- Good evening, we're going to get started with night one of budget hearings for the city of Bloomington 2026. Welcome everybody. I will give you just a brief introduction of what our agenda for this evening will be and I'll quickly lay out some of our procedures and then we'll get going. Oh, I'm so sorry. Roll call. Deputy Clerk McDowell, would you mind taking roll please?
- Councilmember Flaherty? Here. Ruff? Here. Rallo? Here. Piedmont-Smith? Here. Stasberg? Oh, here. Daly? Here. Zulek? Here. Rosenberger? Here. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right, so we will begin with, for Monday, August 18th, we will begin with introductions and overview. We will hear the mayor's budget introduction and the controller's budget overview.
- Our focus this evening, since we are doing a priority-based budget, our focus is high-performing government. So we'll hear the priority overview. We'll be hearing from the Office of the City Clerk, then Office of the Common Council, followed by Office of the Mayor, Office of the Controller, the Legal Department, Human Resources Department. After that, the Information Technology and Services Department.
- And then up after that, finally, will be the Department of Public Works hearing from Administration, Facilities Maintenance Division, and Fleet Maintenance Division. And so for our procedure this evening, we have a motion for the procedure.
- Oh, sorry, President Stossberg. Oh, don't call me President Stossberg. I can just be Councilmember Stossberg tonight, thank you. I would like to move that for the duration of budget week, we limit Councilmember question and answer periods to a maximum of three minutes per Councilmember per presentation, limit Councilmember comment period to three minutes per Councilmember per presentation, and limit public comment to two minutes per speaker per comment period. All right, do we, is this,
- Do we vote on this? Yes. Yes. All right. Can we take a vote? Call, please. Council Member Flaherty. Yes. Ruff. Yes. Rallo. Yes. Piedmont-Smith. Yes. Stosberg. Yes. Daly. Yes. Zulek. Yes. Rosenberger. Yes. And Asari. Yes. Thank you very much. And with that, I believe we are ready to get started. And with us here in chambers, we have Mayor Thompson. Thank you.
- Good evening, everyone. And sidebar, congratulations to the new Asari, who has entered the world. Congratulations to your family, Councilmember. Glad everybody's healthy. I am really excited to present to you the first evening of the 2026
- city budget, and this year is, it is new for a number of reasons. It is our first steps into priorities-based budgeting, and we'll talk a little bit about that more in a minute. But the other thing that's happening, of course, is that we are together preparing for the impacts of SEA 1.
- And so I'm gonna talk about that first, because that will cast some shadows, we'll say, over the rest of the budgeting, not only for this year, but in years to come as well. And so for those listening from home, we did hear a commitment from the State House that they will be re-looking at SCA 1,
- to do improvements next year. All of your advocacy at the table is welcomed there, especially as you see the impacts of just year one of SEA 1. This year alone will experience a loss of about $1.4 million with local income taxes. We know it phasing out by 2028.
- While we're not in as dire a situation as many other cities, this is going to affect us by tens of millions of dollars in the next three years on an annual basis. Our residents with higher property values may be seeing a slight decrease in property taxes, but those with moderately priced homes
- will likely actually see those property taxes increase even though the city is not receiving more funding. Additionally, our ability to bond has been significantly impacted by SEA 1. We have no possibility of new GO or general obligation bonds until one full year after our current bond is complete.
- SEA 1 means that we will need to do less with less. It's not a year that you're gonna see big new programs, and unfortunately, it's not a time that we are able to step in as a city government and fill the funding gaps that our community is experiencing elsewhere. We're here to do the work that only the city can do.
- And unfortunately, we are in an equivalent situation of having our funding cut. While we will do less with less, my commitment is to do it well. And we are seeking to make the choices that have the greatest impact to our city and its residents in this process.
- We talk a little bit about our existing commitments and our obligations. We will first and foremost commit to our existing commitments. We have building projects that are midway through or have been tabled for long periods of time. And we have infrastructure that's in disrepair.
- We will be seeking to fund those existing commitments. And next, we will be maintaining the assets that we've built. Of course, every park, sidewalk, or resource necessitates a maintenance fund. And my administration will prioritize maintenance of the existing resources that we've all come to treasure. Again, the focus on our core resources that only the city can provide
- will be the focus of this year's budget. So in programs, in maintenance, and fulfilling our existing commitments. Those city services, of course, are sewers and water services, streets that have to be maintained and plowed, public safety, and other core city services that the city is in a unique position to provide.
- I want to move to talking about how we're implementing a priorities-based budget. And first, let me just say that we're at the very early implementation stage of priorities-based budgeting, which is still several steps away from achieving an outcomes-based budget, which is our ultimate goal, of course. It will take time to fully implement even priorities-based budgeting. And we're really on step one.
- And rather than choosing to run the budget exactly as we have in previous years we chose instead to offer you and the public an in-progress view and then to allocate and then Help you all understand the steps involved in the transition and improve the process as we go Our goal is to have a comprehensive system eventually that evaluates the effective programs and
- their ability to meet outcomes, and then to allocate fiscal resources accordingly. So an outcomes-based budget is really the fiscal end of driving government by outcomes. The first step of the implementation, of course, was to identify our priority areas, and we did that in collaboration with the council. The priority areas are listed on the screen
- We'll be talking about high-performing government this evening. Later this week, you'll hear about affordable housing and homelessness and economic development. Later, we'll hear about public safety, then community health and vitality, and finally, transportation. We've completed
- this first step, and this is really the only step that we've fully completed so far. And this is really our learning year. We are expecting mistakes. We are expecting and hoping that we all fail forward together and we figure out what bumps there are in the road and how we can improve this process together.
- and frankly that we presume goodwill, that we're all working towards a city that works really well through this budget process. Our next two steps in creating a priorities-based budget is to create program inventories and to cluster those programs under outcomes.
- Those two things are still in early stages. So they're not being fully implemented. And it is deceptively complicated to look at a program and fit it into only one bucket sometimes. And so you'll see that in this process even this year. But we're continuing to work to get those two steps completed.
- Step four, of course, is then to assign the costs to each of those programs. Again, costs of a program is another complicated step. Our software is gonna help us do that, but we have not fully implemented that software yet either. What you'll see listed in this budget as programs is really just the very earliest pass.
- There's a lot of work left to do to get things right and to make sure that we've laid the foundation for our decision making in the future. And I want to note that step five is actually not listed in your book, but this is the ultimate goal. Ultimately,
- When we get to outcomes-based budgeting, we want to be able to evaluate each of our programs and each dollar that we spend against the outcome that it is seeking to provide for our community. So we're in this learning curve.
- And we are going to adjust moving forward. But some of the questions that we're asking really are how granular or broad should each program be? How much are we really discussing the nitty gritty and what's included in a total program cost? And which outcome is associated with each program?
- That obviously is critical to evaluating its effectiveness, but there will be programs that could have fit into multiple buckets. And the example I like to use with the priorities-based budgeting and why it's so important for us to move through this process is that if you take an issue like
- meeting the needs of our unhoused neighbors, we have almost every department working on that in some way and expending resources in some way. As we move away from departmental budget presentations and into priority-based budgeting, we'll be able to see what we're spending, why we're spending it, and could we be making a better impact with those dollars? And there are many other examples like that.
- So as we move forward, we will adjust the plan accordingly. We'll make sure that the... I'm sorry, that's timed. Oh, it's timed. Mayor Thompson. Okay. I'm so sorry. Great. Let me just end with a note. This is visibility we have never had before.
- We can expect a learning curve. And while we are going to be experiencing tough implications of SEA 1, this is also an opportunity for us to ensure that we are making the very best use of every taxpayer dollar that we have. And my commitment is that we will use it to its highest and best use. And we together have to make tough decisions. We cannot fund everything this year. Thank you.
- Thank you very much. Next, we'll be hearing the controller's budget introduction. Oh, I'm so sorry, is this now we ask questions? This is why, there we go. All right, now we will have questions. Any council members have questions? This is our learning process. Yeah, there we go. Council Member Ruff. Thank you, Mayor Thompson, but I was wondering that
- The phrase fulfill our existing commitments has been the highest priority. Can you elaborate a little bit on commitments? I mean, there are plans, there are necessities. People are expecting we'll be plowing the streets and picking up the trash, but can you elaborate a little more on commitments? Yeah, I'll say that
- On that slide, there were three different priorities. I'm not sure that those are in order, but we have logistics building for fire that's halfway complete. We would be wasting resources if we did not finish that.
- We also though have We have other building projects that have been planned and anticipated They're not funded yet and I don't know that we're going to be able to fund them But the city needs them and we would like to be able to fund them eventually Those will not be budget questions though. They'll be bond questions in the future Okay, thank you Any other questions
- Council Member Stossberg. Thank you. I appreciate that you went into some detail about what you consider those core services that only the city can do, because I was gonna ask about that, but I'm also interested to know if kind of as one unit of local government, AKA the city, how much communication you've had right now with say County Council, County Commissioners, and MCCSE, because in theory, I mean, all of us are,
- government bodies of one kind or another. And so when we think about that bucket of things that only government bodies can manage to provide our residents with, I think that we really need to work together with those entities. So has your administration had any meetings with any of those folks yet specifically about tackling financial times and making sure that we're not duplicating services or missing services?
- We have had conversations with MCCSC and members of county council, no formal meetings with the body. But every elected official that I have met with agrees collaboration is key right now. But let's acknowledge it always should be. We shouldn't be duplicating services. And so now is,
- an unfortunate time, but a time that we could use to our best ability to ensure that we push that collaboration and make sure that we're defining our lanes and figuring out who's serving which pieces. Yeah, thank you. That's something that I've been thinking about a lot too, and I think it's really hard.
- to find the time to set up those formal meetings, but I hope that we can work together, administration and council, and then also those other government bodies to do that, because it's really important, and it's to some degree time sensitive, but then it's also hard to squeeze in. So I guess this is my publicly saying, let's try to figure out a way to do that. Thank you. Council Member Asare.
- Thank you, Mayor Thompson. Just maybe one overarching question to help as we navigate through the rest of this. One of the things that I wondered throughout reading was some clarity around what things, and maybe I'll take a step back, is that we're not the first city in the country to ever go through constraints from the state government. And a lot of the times we, and I think you've talked about this clearly, that we need to have some type of expenditure cuts
- But then there's also this element of revenue enhancements, productivity enhancements. But it was unclear to me in the book, what are we cutting? And so maybe I'll just leave it as an open-ended question so you can help us navigate a little bit better over the next couple of days what expenditures were cut to bring us to the level that we're at. Yeah, so you'll be hearing about those in each
- presentation and the controller will answer in more detail some of the things that, some of the choices that we've already made. And I really wanted to highlight in my overview that last year during the budget process we had ideas for things that we wanted to add. We're not in a great position to add things and I think we should all be taking a really critical look at what in fact we could cut.
- And then similarly did we have any conversations about places where we can enhance revenue in the city. Fewer of those at this point because the budget is you know traditionally and we've taken several.
- Steps towards new ways of budgeting but but traditionally driven from from that tax derivative. So that's where we are right now. And there are conversations about how to drive
- revenue elsewhere, but no decisions made yet. Excellent. And then the last question in that line of thinking. The budget book, at least what was presented to us, was based on a flat assumption of our share of lit and the revenue estimates. But then it looked to me like the DLGF put out. I think the B Square report on this, that it's
- quite a bit higher than what was the flat level. Is that just gonna eat into the, I mean, minimize our deficit, or what's the plan? I'm gonna let the controller answer that during her presentation. Fantastic, fantastic. Thank you so much, Mayor Thompson. Council Member Piedmont-Smith. Yes, I wanted to ask, since, as you said, Mayor Thompson, we are in the,
- you know, the first phase of a multi-phase process of going towards outcome-based budgeting. So if we have ideas in reading the budget book or following, you know, this year's process, how do you envision collaborating to move ahead with the future steps? Well, I think the, you know, the council has proactively set up a team to help do that, which my understanding is will be a year-round team.
- And so I think we're all keeping notes during this budget process. And where the rubber really hits the road is when we actually get to trying to implement the software and allocate funding for services. So a continual learning environment and a continual improvement process, I think, should be expected for a number of years. All right.
- If we have feedback after this process, it should go through the fiscal committee of council, or is it the budget task force? Because there were two entities created. Maybe this is more of a question for council president. I think that's a question you all will have to answer. We had thought you were setting up only one team, but there's two teams. And I'm not really clear how you define the differences.
- You all will have to decide what your entity is. We know what our team is You know who who comes to the table from our side, so We're happy to collaborate All right. Thank you Councilmember Stasberg, did you want to address that question? Well, I can if other people want me to I
- I have a thought on it, and that is that Councilmember Asari, as much as I hate to put more things on your plate, is on both the Budget Task Force and the Fiscal Committee, and that might mean that he is kind of primed to be able to take an inquiry and decide whether it has more to do with the outcome-based budgeting transition process, which is Budget Task Force, or whether it has more to do with kind of an ongoing nature of budgeting, which is Fiscal Committee, so maybe
- Councilmember sorry could consider being the point person on that may be supported by staff right now because I know that he has a particularly busy family commitment at the moment Councilmember Rallo Thank You mayor Thompson So I'm just something caught my attention Council President Stossberg asked about collaboration with our county government colleagues and you said we shouldn't be duplicating services and
- which I think is a good idea, especially if budgets are lean. Could you expound on that a bit? What kind of collaboration would we see to, or what kind of services are you referring to in terms of duplication that we could collaborate?
- Well, I'll pick one of my favorites which is that there are a number of entities that provide social service funding throughout the community but we haven't defined what our
- what the city's priorities are with that, what the county's priorities are, community foundation, et cetera. And I actually feel like it's, as a former nonprofit director, it's taxing on the nonprofits to have to submit multiple applications to find their best path to funding. And frequently they get little piecemeal from several folks and then have accountability to several different entities. Ideally, we could find a way to either simply define lanes
- health, et cetera, housing, whatever they are, and work towards those. Or we could have, ultimately, as some communities do, a universal application process so that everything comes into the portal of some sort and we can allocate from there. So that's just one example of duplication that I think may not be serving the community best.
- It's sometimes it's a sort of competition of who has the most staff time available in a nonprofit for who gets the funding What do you think about fire protection is that is that something that we could collaborate on in terms of Not duplicating services. Well, I think I think I
- you ought to ask Chief Kerr that question because we have made major strides in the past year and a half under his leadership collaborating with Monroe Fire Protection District. And I think that will continue and could be grown. But I think he'd be happy to highlight that for you. Okay, great. I will reserve that question for him. Great. Thank you very much.
- Any other council member questions before we go to public comment? Okay. Is everyone okay down there? Anybody want to follow that up with public comment? If any members of the public would like to comment, if you are in the
- Chambers, you can make your way up to the podium, or if you are on Zoom, please raise your hand. Any Zoom takers? No, okay. And it doesn't look like anybody in here is making their way up. All right, so thank you very much. Oh no, now we go back to council for comment. Any council member comments? Council member, sorry, were you trying to?
- Are you sure? Okay, Council Member Stossberg. I just want to thank the Mayor's Administration. I know that they've worked really, really hard on this transition into outcome-based budgeting and working on those steps and trying to figure that out, and I just wanted to take a very brief 15 seconds and appreciate that, so thanks. Oh. Any last comments? No, no? Council Member, sorry.
- And I also just wanted to just similarly for 15 seconds say that I think one of the things we haven't highlighted is how this year we did very early engagement with budget I think SCA one sort of threw us all in a loop, but I think that it is.
- Heartwarming right to the fact that we've been working so closely together on budget sort of throughout this process I think as we as you said very clearly I think there's lots of things still to work out lots of kinks to iron out and the like but just just very appreciative of the of the Collaborative nature of sort of how we've got to where we are now though lot lots more to do but thankful Thank you any other comments Councilmember Piedmont-Smith Yes, I do appreciate the changes that have
- That I've seen in the budget book between last year and this year. I think they're really positive moves and It allows us to understand better how all the departments fit together to work towards common goals One thing I will note Transparency is a key value of the mayor's and I know that we have as a council also value that
- But transparency is not the same thing as being apparent as as being as having something easy for the public to understand. A lot of kind of the data that we have in the be clear portal and even some of the data that we have in our budget book is.
- I think we've made strides towards making it a little more clear, but I think there's still a way to go as far as letting the public know what we're doing with their money. So I just want to stress that transparency is great, but you shouldn't have to learn how to work an Excel document to figure it out. Thank you. Any other council member comments?
- Okay, thank you very much. Moving on to the controller's budget introduction, we have Controller McClellan here, thank you. Good evening council, Controller McClellan. I'm here tonight to provide a brief overview of our proposed budget book. I'm gonna summarize some of the highlights from the controller's memo and that will set the stage for our departmental budget discussions.
- On page 14 of your budget book, that's where I'm going to begin, kind of just going over the key highlights. Page 14 is the general fund snapshot of the budget.
- So the proposed revenues for next year are 54 million and the proposed expenditures are 65.2 million. That's a deficit of 11.2 million. So there are a couple different indicators of fiscal health. There's long-term fiscal health that we're doing very good in. We have a good bond rating and we have very low bond indebtedness. Our short-term fiscal health is a little less good because we are relying on cash reserves to fund this deficit and obviously we
- cannot do that for very long. Let's see here. You'll notice on that general fund snapshot that the actual revenues in 2024 were a lot higher, about 11 million higher than the budgeted revenues. That is due to $3.7 million coming in for supplemental lit.
- And that is due to the bank interest being budgeted at a very, very low number, under a million, and it coming in us actually earning over five million in revenue from bank interest. So that was just like a mismatch in the budgeting. All right, and then I'm gonna move on to page 15 is revenues. Property taxes are estimated to be at 44.8 million. That is including all of the property tax funds that includes the bond funds.
- It's down about 1.1 million due to caps. Local income tax lit accounts for 39.7 million of our revenues. That's about 33% of our total revenues. User fees are 13.1 million. That comes from places like parks and parking, sanitation, permits and permitting, and fines and fees.
- We're gonna estimate interest next year at 4.7 million. That is lower than what we received, what we're receiving last year and this year, for total revenue of 119.8 million. The key issues here in revenue are that we continue to see declining property taxes and declining state shared revenues, and that's gonna constrain our growth. So I'm gonna go to page 17, that's the expenditures,
- So an overview of the total city budget for expenditures is $82.1 million in personnel, $8.5 million in supplies, $41.7 million in other services, $14.9 million in capital outlays for total expenses at $147.1 million. So personnel growth, personnel continues to be the main driver of the city budget.
- and with all debt service payments in other services and charges, about 41.7 million. On page 19, we summarize some staffing changes at the city next year. We eliminated two positions. We added six positions, and there are four reclassifications.
- Adding these positions allows us to remove some consulting services fees in our budget. And that builds long-term growth in the city for capacity to do this kind of work. So there is a 2% COLA built into the budget. Budget is also affected by collective bargaining agreements of police and fire. And with these new positions and
- The decrease in consulting costs, the net fiscal impact is $39,000 after the consulting reductions. On page 20, we summarize the grants and community support that the city gives out to this community. The total proposed city investment in our community directly to the community is $9.3 million across affordable housing and homelessness, economic development, community health and vitality and transportation.
- We provided you with a summary of some of the SE1 changes that are gonna affect us next year. There's a limit on geo bonds. The city cannot issue a new short-term geo bond until 2027. And there is a cooling off period, which is a one-year gap before issuing new debt after short-term geo debt expires. And the lit restructuring is going to begin in 2028.
- Council must adopt new rates by October 1st, 2027 and readopt annually and rates default to zero if we do not readopt. The takeaway with the bond structuring is that we have a lot of work to do with our bond consultants to figure out how we can layer and ladder different types of bonds to meet our needs in this newly defined bonding environment.
- We provide an overview of our debt on page 22 and 23. The current debt service rate is 14 cents. And so that means 14 cents or 14% of the city tax rate is going to pay debt.
- There are thresholds put in place by the Indiana legislature about controlled projects, and there's a chart in your packet about that threshold. If our debt rate gets to 25 cents, no matter how big or small the project is, that will initiate a petition and remonstrance process. So that's just important to know as we go forward in deciding how we're going to finance large projects.
- So our active projects are the Fire Training and Logistics Center, we're in preliminary police station design at 714, and we are looking into preliminary services to decide what we need for a public works service center. I just wanna go over really quickly what our schedule is for these budget hearings this year. We're having our hearings on the 18th, the 20th, the 25th, and the 27th.
- The advertisement for the budget must be published by September 12th. Our public hearing, which is an official meeting that has to happen, is September 24th, and our final budget adoption will be on October 8th. And those will happen according to your schedule. I'm sure you're probably all aware of that. I kind of wanted to go over that for the public. Thank you very much.
- I'm sure there are more questions that can be answered in the department Specifically by the departments and I'm happy to answer any questions now All right, thank you controller McClellan any questions from council members councilmember Rallo Thank you for your presentation Just so we're on the same page in terms of anticipating a
- cost of living increases. I note that cost of living is estimated to increase by 2.7% next year, and we've earmarked 2%. Do you differ with that estimation that I've given you, or is there an explanation for why we're not keeping pace? That's correct. The Social Security estimate for cost of living increases, 2.7%, and we
- We made a decision to go with 2% based on the very large salary increases that we gave to the employees this year. However, we do have the numbers of what a 2.7 increase would cost, so we're happy to discuss that cost and talk about what the increase should be. Okay, thank you. I'm sorry, I just wanna follow. We are trying to be conservative just in
- Just because of the overall budget and the fiscal environment, we just wanted to be conservative to start out and go from there. All right, thank you. I understand my colleague, Councilmember Piedmont-Smith, asked this question by email, and she sent me information from you about potential estimated costs of that 0.7%. Yes. So I'll look into that. I haven't seen it yet. Thank you.
- Any other questions? Did you have a question? Council Member Piedmont-Smith. Yes, I've gotten some feedback from constituents about the remarks the mayor has made and the press release that went out about the budget saying that
- Mayor Thompson's administration started with a 16% $16 million budget deficit. And I think there's been some misunderstanding among the public as to what that means. And I think it
- In a way, it reflects poorly on the previous mayor and on the previous council of which I was part to say that we adopted or we somehow started in the red or adopted a deficit budget.
- We did adopt a budget with $16 million more budgeted for expenditures than for revenues, but we had an operating cash reserves of like 41% or something that is way more than the minimum 17%, which is what the general standard is. So if you could just talk to how that messaging came about.
- I can't speak to how the messaging came about, but when we're asked what the deficit is, we just look at the 1782 from the DLGF and present their revenues and the expenditures. But I agree that the budget has to be decided with all of the information, and that includes the cash balance of all the funds. So knowing the cash balance of all the funds is very important to that.
- to knowing what the fisc, kind of what your cash reserves are and what kind of reserves you have to cover your budgeted expenditures. Did Mayor Thompson, I saw a hand, I don't know. Well, if you were asking about how the messaging came about and it was my message, I'm happy to answer. Can you please come to the microphone? Yeah, sorry. Yeah.
- The question I heard is how the messaging came about. And since it was my message, I think the question's probably for me. The definition of a deficit budget is spending more than what you're bringing in. And it's important that the public understands and has a mindset that we can't keep spending the way we have been spending. It was meant as no criticism to the former council.
- We do have to set expectations for our public that we can't keep spending more than we're bringing in because the cash reserves naturally disappear. So we have to get it balanced at some point. So that's how that messaging originated. Thank you. Anybody else have any questions? Council Member Flaherty. To follow up on just the technical,
- underlying data of that. Am I understanding correctly that the $16 million deficit figure is a reference to the delta between the approved or adopted budget for 2024 expense and revenue lines for the general fund? Okay. And then what was the actual for 2024? The actual for 2024 should be in your budget.
- It's a five million dollar surplus in the line. I'm looking at Looking at page 14. Yes. All right 2024 actual yes the four point nine eight Surplus so we tend to spend our we tend to not spend our in our whole budget that there's also that
- Supplemental lit revenue in there it and the bank interest revenue in there So we didn't spend all of our budget and we got more revenues than we expected. So the 2024 came out in the positive Okay, and so that was true of actually 2022 2023 and 2024, right? Correct And I'm trying to recall last year when we discussed our level of reserves being much healthier than needed frankly didn't we collectively discuss but the administration and the council and
- That it would be beneficial for the city to spend some of that down with intention. Okay. Yes, just confirming my recollection. Thank you. That's how I remember it Councilmember Stossberg What are our cash reserves estimated to be right now like in terms of I don't know if you can make an estimate for 2025 in terms of whether we'll
- Actually have a surplus again this year or not. I don't know if you can guess that based on Based on this budget the estimated reserves at the end of spending the 26 budget will be 25 million in just one second I Would have to log into my computer but I can give you the estimated cash reserves at the end of this year and the estimated cash reserves at the
- at the end of 2026 will be 25 million. And what percentage is that? Like if it was like 41% or something like that of our... I have to look at my spreadsheet. Okay, I'll try to follow up on that with in a written questions, then you can have that. Sorry, I wasn't planning on asking that tonight. One thing that I did
- I wanna make sure to ask you, I think that you're the right question for this. It goes to a bunch of the salary numbers in the actual budget book, okay? And for a lot of the spreadsheets that are at the end of these, it's the health insurance didn't actually increase in budget between 2025 and 2026. Are those just all estimates right now? Because some departments have health insurance costs increasing and others don't.
- We did not increase the amount that the city pays towards health insurance next year. It's the same per employee. So if it increased, it was probably due to adding an employee or some kind of fluctuation like that, like number of employees in their department or a correction. Maybe we didn't have enough budgeted last year, something like that. Okay. So if health insurance costs increase, then that's going to be on the employees to pay for those health insurance cost increases because the city is not going to increase their share at all.
- The city's share is enough to cover the increase in health insurance costs. We recently got a... Is that an HR question? Should I follow up with HR? A 1% increase in our health insurance costs, and so that amount does cover it still. Okay, okay. And then the other thing that I wanted to ask about, I'll just email it to you, thanks.
- Any other questions? All right. I don't see any takers, so we will go to public comment. Is there anybody in chambers or on Zoom? Please make yourself known so we can take public comment. Has anybody shown interest on Zoom? Yes, we have on Zoom. Oh, wonderful. Thank you very much. Please state your name, and you have two minutes for your public comment. Kevin Keough.
- Yeah, I've been looking, trying to understand that deficit. I know I've sent emails to the council and to the controller. But there's a schedule at the end of 2023 that's part of the audited financials. This one isn't. But it's a schedule showing the changes between the years. And I'm a CPA, but this is the first time I think I've ever seen the term budgetary basis. And I guess that's where I'm getting hung up.
- is this budgetary basis. But the schedule also shows it's kind of a qualitative report because it has a variance. It takes the variance of what this budgetary basis final budget is to actual. And what's very concerning about this, it kind of shows how good are you at estimating your revenues and how good you are maintaining the spending to make sure you don't overspend much.
- And the positive is if you collect more taxes or revenues, that's a positive variance. And if you spend less than you budgeted, that's a positive variance. But what really caught my attention is the
- At the end of the year, the final fund balance, it's positive, but the variance is like 70,800,000, which is just an obscene amount of money, I would think, from the schedule. I don't know. Again, I'm trying to understand this. But it shows to me, there was no way you had, I mean, I can understand this final budget thing, but this thing is just showing your estimates.
- And to say there was a, because the deficit, this thing will continue on for a few more years where it's gonna look really wacky because of this budgetary basis that you maintain, because it's carrying these really, some really wacky numbers, because they don't reflect what actually happened. So that's my key, and I know my work time's running out, but thank you very much. Thank you very much for that. Any other comments on Zoom or here in chambers?
- Nobody on Zoom? And nobody in chambers? All right, so we will go back to council members for comments. Anybody have comments? Not down there. Oh, council member Rallo. You may. Do you, Mr. Keough asked a question I thought I would relay it to our controller. Controller McClellan, do you have that document
- Mr. Keough referred to required supplementary information, schedule of revenues, expenditures, and changes, and it gives the fund balance as referring to end of year with the variance. Yes, I do have that. Okay, maybe could you explain that? I'll take a look at it and I'll get back to all of you and Mr. Keough. Okay. Any comments? Going once.
- You can finish out your time, yeah. Okay, quick comment. I appreciate the administration's work under the circumstances of, you know, loss of, anticipated loss of revenue. But just, you know, as we start this process off, I've been historically critical of budgets that don't reflect COLA.
- And I think it's a bad precedent to do that. It's also, I think, it's something I've experienced in the past. And I think that, I realize times are tight, but this budget calls for increasing FTEs. I think four employees added. I'll suspend judgment on whether those are needed, but I think
- Reflects badly if we don't increase the cola to to what's anticipated by the Social Security Administration while adding more employees, so I Have more to say but I'll leave it at that for now. Thank you Thank you anybody else with final comments Councilmember Piedmont Smith
- Yeah, and I don't know if this is appropriate, more appropriate here or later with the HR budget, but I also am very concerned that we're not keeping up with increasing cost of living. It does build up, so if we don't give a cost of living adjustment that's equivalent to inflation this year, then even if we catch up with that next year, that's still gonna leave people behind. And part of the,
- salary study that is being implemented, and I know that there's a lot of money going to that, but that is only as good as the salaries keeping up with inflation. And so I don't think it's a good reason to say, well, people are getting raises anyway, so they don't need this. The cost of everything is going up. So I really would like to look at those numbers
- For my colleagues who may not have seen this, we did get some additional information that's also now available on the City Council website from the controller about there's some revenue, some fund balance numbers there, and there's also the cost of living adjustment calculations there. So I encourage you all to take a look at that, and hopefully we can do better for the employees. Thank you. Any other comments?
- Council Member Ruff. You know, when we did the original living wage ordinance 20 something years ago, one of the main sticking points was indexing it to the cost of living every year, having it automatically adjust to the cost of living.
- And that was to keep it, of course, from just falling behind, like the federal and many state minimum wage does. And then, when it comes time to make a big adjustment, it's just, it's much more difficult. And in the interim, you have made it more difficult for people.
- Yeah, I have to agree with my fellow council members who said that You know, I just I don't think it makes sense to to not adjust to The best estimate we have we can point to for cost of living That's all. Thank you Anybody else with final comments
- Thank you very much. We will now get our human resources introduction from Dr. No, we're not. Okay, sorry about that. So we move on to presentation from questions from the Office of the City Clerk. High-performing government overview. Who is presenting the high-performing government overview? Deputy Mayor Knapp, thank you.
- Deputy Mayor Knapp. We elected this year, and we talked about it beforehand, but I think it's a change, so it's been hard to digest. Since the HR overview included a lot of data that was also covered in the controller's memo, and Dr. Paycheck will be up on the stand later tonight. In the interest of time, since we have our longest night here tonight, we elected to cut that overview since the facts are all there, and you'll have an opportunity to ask her questions when she comes up. So I thought before each of these,
- I would just talk a little bit about what we included in that overview for the benefit of the public, but also to help us understand as we go forward what we'll need to talk about and the decisions we'll need to make. And one of the things that is challenging about priority space budgeting or outcome space budgeting is that every single dollar has to be allocated somewhere. And some of those options are really easy. If we're paving a road, we know that that's transportation. Some of the other options are not easy.
- And we have work to do as we go forward in both defining what are the programs. What do we call a program? It's easy to look at a program that has a name and already exists, like ESD's SEAL grant program that has a name. It's less easy to come up with program names for the work that council does or that the office of the mayor does or that legal does and put those into buckets.
- So in this category tonight, these are the departments that will be presenting are listed up here, but I wanted to talk a little bit about that overview and what we included and why. So we included all the departments that provide internal support to the city as an organization, HR, ITS, legal controller. And these last two are not intuitive, but fleet, which only provides service to fleet vehicles for city employees and facilities maintenance, which is of course the building that we're in and some other ones as well.
- So there is, while the public may encounter employees driving cars that have been serviced by fleet, and of course they come into this building, those are largely internal services to government. We also include elect officials and leadership offices, clerk, council, mayor. And then some departments have divisions or sections of their budget that are already set aside and labeled administration. And the question of what portion of those administrative
- leadership expenses for a department like fire or public works or parks should be thought of as government, high performing government and which portion of those should be considered part of the actual programs that they run is a complicated one and our consultants that will help us implement the software will have more advice on that. So in addition to the way this process worked we have
- new software and department and unit heads went in and entered and also AI generated some suggested topics based on previous implementations of this software in other municipalities, like what are some traditional categories of programs, traditional programs that exist. And then departments entered programs that they knew about, we corrected some of those and then we tried to cluster them so that we didn't give you a list of
- just 80 programs, but there was a way to kind of chunk them out. So are the programs right? Do they have the right level of granularity or should they be broader? Did we cluster them in the right way? Are they under the right priorities? All of these things need so much work. So you're gonna look through here and be like, why did she put that there? Why did they put that there? It could be wrong. But these are kind of the general buckets that we came up with to cluster the programs around.
- And so as we go forward, I think what we'll need to work on is not just what do we include as part of, for lack of a better phrase, overhead, and what do we not include and bundle in with those areas, public safety rather than public safety administration, but how do we identify and measure outcomes of high performing government
- government programs, the work that all of us do, that legal HR and other service departments do, and how do we present that during budget season? How, when we have multiple departments that might have expenses in every bucket, do they present every single time? Just in some? So these are all some of the questions that we'll have to unravel, and I'm happy to take questions, or we can just move right on. All right, thank you very much. Any questions for Deputy Mayor Nett?
- Council Member Asari. Thank you, Deputy Mayor. Perhaps, I mean, maybe the obvious question to ask is how are we defining a high performing government? And I mean, it's a question maybe that's much more fundamental than the steps ahead of thinking about how we track certain things.
- Well, that's a great question, and I could slice that probably a lot of ways. I think some of the things we've already talked about here tonight, transparency, and as I agree with Council Member Piedmont-Smith, that it's not just being transparent, but making it accessible so that people understand. I also think high-performing government provides quality customer service. Whatever the government services that you're, or answer that you're seeking, it's easy to find, you understand the answer. If you're getting a permit,
- It's clear your expectations are met, you're treated with courtesy all the way through, but there's also of course the whole fiscal component and being accountable and being good stewards and are we working on the right work? We could be completely polite and transparent and everyone could get through everything quickly, but if it's not the right work, then it's all in vain. So layers to that I think.
- Because my repeat month Smith I'm sorry if this sounds repetitive, but if we have input into these categories Should we can we reach out to you or reach out through the committee? I think I think we should come up with a consolidated way to do it and
- One of the challenges we face on our side is, you know, we can work as a team and have as many conversations as we want on our side about what we think. You all have a different challenge. And when we get conflicting feedback, if that were to happen, and we haven't gotten that yet, but if someone were to say, I think this definitely should be in this category, and someone else says, no, it definitely should be in that one, we'll need your help in figuring out how to do that. So I would say, keep a running list, and the budget task force, we can dive in as soon as we start.
- Because I think you did hit upon a kind of a philosophical question of the administration of fire and police, should that be in fire and police, should that be in, so anyway, yes, we will. To be continued over many months. I will refrain from contacting you with every little thing and we'll have an organized feedback process, thank you. Council Member Sari.
- I still have time. I think I had a minute and 50 seconds or something. It will not take that long. I think the thing that I've struggled with, and it may just be because I'm tired or dense or something, but as we're thinking about this meaningful step towards outcome-based budgeting, which is priority-based budgeting,
- what's unclear to me and maybe again it might just be me but we talk about like at this level like trade-offs and we're talking about you know doing less with less it actually wasn't clear to me what trade-offs were making nor was it clear to me what we're not prioritizing by effectively making these priorities that we've set and so I'm really not asking about like the semantics of like what do we mean by hyper
- forming government. I think that's an important question, but not a philosophical question. In the brass tacks of this, what are we deciding? These things matter to us as a city that we're presenting here in this budget. Well, I hope that by looking at the program lists as imperfect as they are, that what I hope it would do for you, which it certainly did for me, was
- Deepen my understanding of all of the things that the city actually does so I think the first is getting that baseline assessment do we actually know all of the activities that the city does and What they cost and how much time staff spend on them and I think there there were some eye-openers for me in this process I had no idea that the city gives out 9.3 million dollars, for example that we were passed through for that much money there are other little surprises for me on that and um, so I think once we
- that work of defining the outcomes and saying, is it the right work and what do we cut is much easier once we have a shared understanding of what are we currently doing. Any other questions? All right, no other questions. So we will open it up to public comment at this time. Is there anybody in chambers or on Zoom who would like to make public comment?
- I see someone approaching the podium. When you are ready, please state your name, and you'll have two minutes. Good evening. This is Chris Remge from the Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce. I was going to find my little niche here, what I wanted to say. Didn't know when to say it, but I appreciate the mayor's budget with the no new initiatives and sort of very sobering in the face of sort of state overview and legislation.
- Looking at high-performing government outcome-based measurements, when we get a sense of that, we're ultimately going to look at cutting our major thing, which is personnel costs, and we need to start looking into that. That's one thing we had to do at the chamber when we've gone down one and a half FTEs and make some of those sort of sobering decisions on a departmental level. Who's doing what? What can be streamlined? What can we add? Because these are going to be hard decisions, and you do need to get an assessment of just
- listening in these meetings on what is an essential service and what is not and what is that 80% include that the government should be doing. These are all things that need to be answered. So next time, next year, we should have a much firmer picture and we'd still need to be making sure that we're making progress on that where we can start making some very hard decisions on these personnel cuts. I thank you for your time. I look forward to the rest of the budget season. Thank you for that. Is there anybody on Zoom?
- who has raised their hand. Nobody on Zoom, anybody else in the chambers? Nope, okay, so we are good. We're gonna come back to council for comment. Any last comment before we move on? All right, I think that wraps that up. Thank you very much. And so now that I have finally found the right agenda, we move on to Office of the City Clerk. And I believe presenting tonight we have
- Clerk Bolden Good evening Did not expect that y'all I'm so sorry So my name is Nicole Bolden I'm the Bloomington City clerk For those who may be visually impaired. I'm wearing a tan colored jacket and a navy blue dress so I'm going to This is my what tenth
- Presenting a budget to the City Council on behalf of the clerk's office And I did a quick run through of my budget over the last few years And I saw that I tend to not make major changes every year every couple years there may be a change But this is not one of them, so we'll be very fast So wow We have five full-time employees one part-time employee we have several
- Things that we do in the office that fall under the programs, but overall we are all part of the good governance program. We've had some successes this year with certifications, compliance with continuing education. We're still adapting to new laws and regulations to ensure compliance. I know you all have been part of the Zoom conversations and everything else.
- And we've got more opportunities come in the year coming up, partnering with council staff in new ways and exploring new software for more efficient services. This is the joy slide for you this whole budget season. You're not going to see any significant increases. Take a moment, breathe it in. There you go.
- Before I conclude, I do want to take this moment, which is utterly inappropriate in my budget, but I don't know a better time to do so because they're in the room.
- to say thank you to Mayor Thompson for writing a proclamation for the Indiana League of Municipal Clerks and Treasurers. It was presented last week while we were all doing our continuing education. I would like to thank Comptroller McClellan for actually reading said proclamation on behalf of the administration. I greatly appreciated it. I'd like to thank Council Member Asari for being willing to come and attend, but unfortunately unable to, and also congratulate Council Member Asari on the birth of his new daughter, which I strongly encouraged him to name after me,
- I don't think that happened. You did too? These are the things. So I'm available for any questions and I'm happy to delve a little bit more into the concept of governance as we see it through the clerk's office. Thank you very much for your presentation. Any questions from council members? Council member Stossberg. Yeah, hi, thank you.
- In the introductory part of this, it mentions the clerk's office officiating marriages. And are you still officiating marriages? From time to time, we have still officiated marriages. But we have not done any, actually, I should say weddings, not marriages, because we're officiating weddings. But we have not opened it up in general widely. Is there a reason why that change was made? Because I feel like it
- that you used to have these days when people could come and have a wedding and that you would officiate and that
- Maybe that's closed a little bit. So it started during the pandemic where we were concerned about having members of the public come into the office on a regular basis. And then for a while we were short staffed and coming up to staffing, full staffing, not only in the clerk's office, but in the council office as well. So while the clerk's office was helping to actually, once we were fully staffed, we were also helping the council with a lot of their workload and their staff onboarding and other tasks that needed to be done.
- And then since staffing is approaching stability at this point to resume marriage officiating? That's a great question and it's something we're still exploring. Okay. I think any other questions I'll ask and I'll send later. Thanks. Okay. Any other questions? Councilmember Piedmont-Smith. Yes. Thank you for your amazing 0% increased budget proposal.
- Quite unprecedented in my long service here. It's not actually. We've done it before, but usually the increases have come from the cost of living increases that we have for staff. And I will always push for increases for staff. So does this mean that your budget for staff in 2025 is, I mean, I assume that, okay,
- Let me back up a minute. So the 0% increase in the personnel lines, how does that reconcile with getting a cost of living increase? If there is an increase in cost of living, and boy, Controller McClelland almost made me jump out of my skin. I'm going to slide over.
- The clerk's budget last year had a vacant position, and it was budgeted at the midpoint. She's filled that position, and it is being budgeted now at step one. So her personnel budget saw a decrease due to the filling of that position. So she did get the 2% COLA added to her budget, and it just also still netted a decrease in her budget. Thank you for clarifying. Thank you.
- I have another question. I was looking at the high-performing government chart and the subgroup and program titles within the clerk's office. One of these, of course, is city council support, which we appreciate. It says, provides administrative and logistical support to the city council, including agenda preparation, meeting scheduling, and document distribution. My understanding is prepared
- By City Council staff with input from the council president. So I'm a little I was a little confused to see that here You don't only have agendas for your whole council meetings You also have agenda for all your committees and the clerk's office does support and provide or helping with that agenda preparation Scheduling meetings and that sort is part of what we view as the agenda prep Happy to take it out if you disagree with that, but we do help in other meetings as well All right, thank you
- Thank you so much. First question, could you tell the general public what they get in return for investing in a clerk's office? Yes.
- Although I'm going to fight my urge to say, you get a new car, you get a new car, you all get a new car. What you get actually is access to the council records. One of the big things that the clerk's office does is we are the memory keeper for the council. So we actually make sure that you're getting access to all the legislation that is passed by the council, the minutes from the council, the memos, the attendance, the legislative index. So if people want to look up something that was passed in the last couple of years, that's part of what we've been working on.
- Where was I in terms of that? Sorry. We also handle parking citation appeals. So that's something else that you get through in the clerk's office, which is every time somebody feels like they've gotten a citation that was issued incorrectly, they come through the clerk's office and say, hey, I think I paid for my time. And then we can look and say, no. But that is part of the process that we also look at.
- I'm trying to remember all of the programs that we do through the clerk's office and you caught me off guard just to touch with that question. But I think the bigger picture is we are the ones who make sure that city government is kind of running quietly. You will see us most if we are actually making an error. It's kind of like, what was I saying earlier? It's like walking into your house when it's clean. It's just clean. You're not going to notice. But you will notice if somebody leaves their dirty laundry all over the floor. So I think of it as keeping
- our house, or city government clean. And when you think about the constraints, and I think there's, we don't get a lot of chances to talk about the sort of functioning and operation of the clerk's office, so I think budget is a great time to do that, and thank God for a 0% increase or whatever, but when you think about the, if you, Blue Sky thinking how you would operate to serve the city of Bloomington, how would you do that?
- like, because we're talking about high-performing government, right? And I've had the opportunity to think about clerks quite a bit this last week. And I'm just trying to think about, like, how do you position the clerk's office and what other things outside of funding? I also think there's some structural changes that we should be talking about, just like, how do you position the clerk's office to actually serve the needs of Bloomington residents better? You know, it's very difficult because a lot of the role of the clerk is actually written into state statutes. So I am constrained a lot by what the law says we are supposed to do. Now, clerks,
- have a different time of it than clerk treasurers who have a lot more responsibilities. If you can imagine somebody doing the clerk's job and the controller's job in one person, that's what clerk treasurers do for clerks themselves. My pie in the sky would be to
- It would be to actually have a larger staff where we could actually provide a lot of the administrative support that the council Needs and free up the council attorney to actually do more of the legal work that they need to do I know at one point there was some discussion about restructuring council staffing and everything else that would be my dream which would be a way to actually enable more work that the council actually produces for the city as opposed to
- being in such a reactive posture, but being able to be more proactive and actually get some of the things done that the council has said they wanna get done. And I think you took me a place I didn't necessarily plan on going, so I apologize if that's too much. That's your time for questioning, thank you. Any, not you, you stay. In case there's any other questions. Yes. Anybody else have any questions? No questions.
- Thank you, Clerk Bolden. I'm gonna open it up to public comment now. If anybody here in chambers has anything or anybody on Zoom? No, give it one more beat. Still no hand? Okay, thank you. And now I will open it up to council member comment. Anybody have any comments?
- Bless you. All right. Looks like thank you very much, Clerk Bolden. We appreciate everything. Thank you all. Have a good evening. You too. Now we will move on to presentation from the Office of the Common Council. And I believe we have Council Attorney Lainer here to present for us. Thank you.
- Good evening, I'm pleased to present Common Council's budget priorities this evening. The scope of Council's office. I'm sorry, can you please introduce yourself? I'm Lisa Lainer, Council Attorney. Sorry. The scope of the office is broad, supporting 13 programs over four priority buckets.
- impacting high performing government, community health and vitality, transportation, and public safety. Council staff consists of three full-time employees and a graduate fellow who works 12 hours a week. Across those four priority buckets, key challenges and initiatives are anticipated in 2026.
- Budget changes have been requested to meet those challenges and initiatives and to further the city's budget priorities. Regarding high-performing government, there are three key challenges and initiatives next year. Recent changes in state laws in Indiana have made
- legislative support and meeting services more cumbersome, laborious, and multifaceted. In response to that, the initiative is to allocate staff time to streamlining practices for council members and staff in order to make those services more efficient and effective. The second challenge pertains to ADA accessibility laws, which will take
- effect in April of 2026. Those laws will require council to ensure that documents used in its meetings and on its website be fully accessible. This will, and that is true whether council prepares those documents or third parties do. This will be a major commitment for council staff to reach compliance
- The initiative in response to this is to allocate staff time to create and refine templates and processes for compliance. Challenge number three pertains to employee hiring and retention. I'm told that there has been turnover in Council's office for the last two years. I've been here for approximately 10 months. Attention to work environment,
- Staff resources and training are needed to support employee retention and continuity of services with the goal of maintaining a fully staffed office in 2026. Toward that end, I thank the mayor and the administration for providing office space, enabling our staff to be consolidated in one location,
- Office space where all of our employees can be together and that space includes a conference room The fourth challenge and initiative pertains to program growth across other priority buckets Council in its staff operate
- the Jack Hopkins grant program in the community health and vitality bucket, which has increased from $350,000 to $500,000. It also operates the sidewalk committee and the transportation bucket, which also has increased from $350,000 to $500,000. The initiative in response is to position the office to meet
- the demands of this growth and complexity without detracting from other services and programs such as the Community Advisory on Public Safety Commission, which is within the public safety bucket. In response to these challenges and initiatives, I'll highlight some proposed budget changes.
- The office consolidation supports employee retention, and already we've seen increased efficiency as a result of that, which impacts high-performing government. The proposal includes an increase in office supplies and equipment because we're no longer sharing those expenses with the clerk's office, as well as an increase in other services for the installation of a key card system.
- Likewise, there's an increase in staff instruction and dues and subscriptions, which provides additional resources to staff in the form of Indiana municipal law.
- conferences and seminars and additional resources for legal research. The proposed budget also would add a second temporary contract fellow to support staff in meeting the increased accessibility requirements next year while also allowing our current fellow to focus on Jack Hopkins support among other projects.
- I also want to speak this evening to an increase for contractors and workshops in the amount of $30,000, which supports all bucket priorities.
- Regarding contractors, this would add capacity of staff turnover continues going forward, enabling staff potentially, if need be, to contract on a project basis for legal research or some type of legal support. This also would add resources and training to staff to gain expertise.
- have a broad scope in our office and limited staff and As a result, we can't be experts in all practice areas that we cover This line item would it could be used for grant administration advice or training with a professional grant administrator who could regarding
- best practices in the area of grants, perhaps streamlining our processes, given the complexity of our program and growth of our program now. The slide item also could be used for deliberation session facilitator on a particularly challenging topic, or it could be used for targeted advice on complex legal issues where there may be
- limited or conflicting legal authority. And of course, it could potentially be used for an opinion if the backlog with the open door for open door law questions continues with the public access counselor.
- Likewise this could be used to fund workshops to update staff and council members regarding improvements in legislative processes budget practices updates and strategies for legal research as well so these increases aim to
- improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the services delivered by council members and council staff to improve our high-performing government services and to support other bucket priorities as well. Thank you for your consideration. Thank you very much. Any questions from council members? Council member Stossberg.
- Thank you so much, that was a great presentation. I have a question, and actually this is a question that I have repeatedly throughout the night, so it might mostly be a controller question, but I realize that this is the first time it's coming up here. So in terms of personnel services, the percent change was 9%. Is that due to the fellow, is that due to, I mean because of COLA is 2%, but then that personnel service is going up 9%, and then actually I think if I scroll down,
- to the actual salaries, it's 10% in salaries and wages. So can somebody, and that might not be attorney Lainer, explain some of that? Actually, I asked the same question and received a response from the deputy controller by email. Salary increases from 2025 to 2026 are a direct reflection of citywide implementation of the salary study in 2025, plus a 2% COLA for 2026.
- Of course, FICA and PERF are a percentage of that increase as well. And then there is a DC match, which will be increased this year because last year the system only captured DC match for the three full-time employees. This was an error that was missed during the budgeting process and is being corrected this year.
- Basically, the step stuff that we approved a couple of weeks ago, that just had more impact. So we just had the clerk's office. It didn't have that kind of impact because of estimations last year with hiring a new person. But it does. Am I understanding that right? My interpretation of this email is a little bit different with respect to the match.
- There's a total amount of about $9,300 that would be increased this year as a result of correcting from last year. I guess I'm mostly looking at the salaries and wages part and not so much the other pieces of this. And so I don't know, Control McLean, I don't know if you can only answer that in 45 seconds or I should just like ask you again on one of the other presentations because they're often like there's a bunch of them like this.
- I'm looking at the sheet that has like all the blue lines on it. All the salary lines in the column that's 2025 adopted budget. All those salaries are the salaries that we adopted last year and they don't have any of the salary study adjustments made to them yet. So there are adjustments that we made at the beginning of this year. There are further adjustments that we made in August. All of those adjustments are reflected in the 2026 proposed budget.
- So some of the increases then farther on down have to do with basically increases that we've already made So it's that like six million dollars that was in the human resources budget last year that then got distributed to all the departments is that part of the I'm getting a thumbs up back there from the deputy mayor and my time is up so We can delve into that another time if we have to because yeah Any other councilmember questions
- Councilmember questions. Okay, is are there any public comments anybody in chambers or on zoom? Who would like to speak? Has anybody raised their hand on zoom Okay, and I don't see anybody Hustling up to the podium. So I'm going to assume we have no takers We'll bring it back here to council for final comments any comments from council members
- Can you put it in the Google Doc, please? Thank you. All right, any other? Yes, Council Member Stossberg. I'll just comment and say thank you to Council Attorney Lehner for her attention to this budget. This has been the first time that she's done this, and she's been very deliberate and attentive to trying to
- figure out the process and be very transparent in coming to fiscal committee and kind of iterating it multiple times and thinking through it very carefully. So I appreciate that and great job on your first budget presentation for council. Thank you, it's been a pleasure and the fiscal committee was a help. Council member Piedmont-Smith. Yes, I would like to speak in support of the $30,000
- Increase in the line for consultants and workshops It sounds like a lot of money but I think that given the complex nature of a lot of what we deal with and the details of state code and the upcoming details of That we don't even know all of yet for for various state laws that have passed and also the fact that there is
- very little guidance now from the state for complying with the open door law. That I think that this kind of having this resource to consult other legal experts is going to be really important. In addition, I know how much the council in the last two years has
- The council staff has struggled with the amount of time involved with the Jack Hopkins Social Service Fund program. And the significant increase between 2024 and 2025 does mean that there are more, the applications are, well, they always seem to increase anyway, but it's a more complex process. There's more paperwork to keep track of.
- I can see that some extra support might be needed there as well. I think that other departments often do have reserve funds, budgeted funds in these lines because you don't want to get into a tight legal situation where you really need some outside support and you don't have it. I think this is a wise investment.
- to make sure that we follow all of the required laws and get the best legal advice and also the best administration of our grant programs as possible. Any other comments? Council member, sorry.
- I think just generally reflecting on both our proposed budget and the clerks and this overarching comment about reduplication of efforts, I think that that's something that in the weeks and months ahead is something we really should be evaluating.
- There's a strange sort of Ouroboros thing here where we're like, we want to control Jack Hopkins, but then we also say, but it creates a lot of work. And so as a consequence, we need to create more work and more capacity for that. So it's creating, it's sort of creating an inflationary sort of pressure on us. And so I just think we need to be critical about the services that these different offices provide the way, because we're hearing a lot about the tensions on sort of the work
- of counsel attorney particularly, but then I'm just thinking.
- OK, so if we get some additional consultants, does that alleviate the load? It just sort of feels to me like we're just going to continue to fill all the space. We fill a lot of your time with questions, like whether or not some dead man in his grave would allow us to stop a meeting or something like that, which feels sort of like we could be a little bit more critical about the way that we spend time. And so I'm a little concerned about bloat in our own budget because I think we're just going to continue to fill
- that space. So if we put $30,000, I imagine we're going to spend $30,000. So what type of controls do we even have on that? I think there's a lot of interesting proposals around figuring out ways, for example, for the clerk's office to reorganize in a way where some of this work isn't sort of duplicated by our staff and so on and so forth. So I think these are sort of broader conversations.
- just about sort of how we're spending resources and if... Oh, I still have a minute. If our council attorney is spending this much time doing things like Jack Hopkins, then we should just figure out whether we want to control that or whether it makes more sense for it to be administered by hand so that we're not using all of this staff time to do something that maybe could be more efficiently in, what do we say, high performing in some other context.
- Any other comments? All right, thank you very much, Attorney Lanner, appreciate it. So next up, we will be hearing a presentation from the Office of the Mayor. I believe Deputy Mayor Knapp will be making that presentation. Please remember to introduce yourself at the podium. Gretchen Knapp, Deputy Mayor. The Office of the Mayor budget is
- pretty straightforward and simple most years, and it is this year too, so hopefully this will be clear. We have, overall we show a 2% decline in our budget, which I'll get to, but first I just wanted to talk a little bit about what we do in the office of the mayor, and it covers a lot of territory, but certainly the mayor spends a lot of her time meeting with constituents and with organizational partners and leaders in the city on some of these topics. Attainable housing is a big,
- part of the work that she spends her time on, whether that's Hopewell, UDO permitting process, or evaluating the success of our measures and incentives to date. When we say we have X number of affordable housing units, are they actually occupied by people who need them or not? And what can we do to make sure that more of those units are occupied? Are they all safe and so on?
- Street homelessness, also a major area of focus for the entire city staff. Every department is engaged in that, but particularly the mayor. Transparency, many of us in the office of the mayor, including our director of communications, director of public engagement, myself, are working on that, which involves not just how we communicate information out and town halls and things like that, but the major website overhaul and all the various dashboards that are currently on it and making sure that those are accessible.
- I agree again with Councilmember Piedmont Smith's assessment that the BeClear data portal has some great data if you know what it is that you're looking at and there are probably some ways to make that more understandable. FOIA process, you report these are key ways that people interact with the city that we've been working very hard on reducing the timeline for responding to FOIA requests and you report we have
- a long way to go. We have more things to do to improve there. It's not just how fast you do it, but do you give the right information? Is it helpful and so on? And I'm very happy with the progress we've made there to date, but there is more to go. You Report is a great example of if you are actually trying to file one and you go on our website, you will see you have to click open every single box to see what all of your possible options might be. And most people get tired before they
- click through everything and so they just kind of pick a category and put in their you report. But I'm happy to report that we started that work at the beginning of this year with 67 pages of you reports and we got it down at one point to under 25. There will always be a lot of pages, but we've removed people who are no longer working for the city from getting you reports.
- Lots of cleanup on L5 to do there. We also are very involved with capital and maintenance planning and a lot of those plans, as you know, with SEA1 and the shakeup in bonding and funding has changed some of that, so there's more to do there. And then we have a lot of focus on internal operations improvements, including people strategy, the data tools that we use in the city, what are the processes to get work done.
- So that's kind of what we work on. But the budget stays fairly consistent from year to year. The big changes in our budget this year, the reason why we're 2% under budget is two reasons, essentially. One is there is the community survey that we administer every other year. So that is a $30,000 to $40,000 cost every other year.
- This is a survey year that will go out later this fall, but next year is not, so it's not included next year. And we also had the Civic Brand consulting project on the books this year, which was a one-time expense and won't appear next year. So we do have personnel increases, and those are largely the implementation of the CROS study. We did request for next year a part-time
- role that would be an emergency management person that this is an issue that has been of importance to council I know in the past and certainly to us too but we do not have the expertise within the city. I consulted with IU's emergency management folks and they gave us some great advice and basically said you need a person the county has a person
- we probably need a person and we think we could start part-time with that and that person would be involved in creating safety plans for every city facility. Parks already has some safety plans so we're not starting from zero but there is a lot of work to do especially as we move into Showers West and make other changes. So that probably does need to be a person with some very specific expertise who
- Spend some time on it. We've also looked at our travel and training When I looked at previous years administration spent around 12,500 or budgeted that pretty regularly in our first year We attended more conferences to see what's what's useful and we've learned
- which ones are useful, and so we've pared that back a little bit, but that's not really the big impact on our budget. It really is the loss of taking out that big one-time consulting fee and not having a civic brand, or not having a survey in the budget for next year, but that will come back in the 2027 budget. That's it, happy to take your questions. Thank you very much. Any questions from council members?
- Councilmember Piedmont-Smith. Yes, thank you, Deputy Mayor Knapp, and thank you so much for all of your efforts with the budget book. I know that you are a driving force behind some of the positive changes. I wanted to ask about the new part-time emergency management planner.
- As even tonight, we've been talking about, you know, maybe consolidating offices, maybe trying not to duplicate things that other layers of government do. But of course, the county has an emergency management agency. So how do.
- How do you envision this part time position working with that agency and why do you think it's necessary to have a person at the at the city level. We did talk about whether we could hire a consultant for this role and the conclusion that we came to was because that would be a one time fee albeit much more probably.
- There are a couple aspects to having a person on staff that are an advantage, and one is someone who has contact to all of the city people and city drives and building plans and doesn't need a project manager to manage the person that you've outsourced it to. So a person who's embedded in the city and can learn how different departments use the space and what the concerns are of various constituencies, for example, here in council chambers or in other areas, just to use this building as one example.
- If you think of CBU also has many facilities that need safety plans and they have some, but we do need someone who can be deeply embedded to do that. And then once you have a plan, you can have a plan, but if nobody knows what the plan is, then you don't really have a plan. So training, ongoing training is very important. And for that reason, that is very hard to stay on top of from a consultant standpoint.
- It's easier to do that if you have a person who is creating those, but we have easily two years of work I could see for a part-time person just to create the safety plans and make analyses of what kinds of investments we need to make in the actual buildings or processes and how they would work with the county. And it's possible that at some point we would determine, you know, okay, this person does some other things too, but that's why we would start with part-time.
- Okay, so you imagine that they would kind of be in regular contact with the county agency and especially during emergencies. Yes, and we already do that as a team. Public Works in particular and utilities are always, and BPD, Fire work with the county regularly on emergency management. So this would be more of a person to wrangle the rest of us that are not in those departments and make sure that we know what to do in emergency. Great, thank you.
- Any other questions councilmember Stossberg on that for just a second Where would this part-time role be in the org chart? And of course, I put that answer on there and it's a part-time role And so this is a new thing to me I didn't know last year that traditionally the city hasn't put part-time roles in the salary ordinance so and we discussed this after we got to I've made my org chart and didn't include a part-time role and there was some discussion of
- The controller and I talked about, should it be a consultant? After all, I went back and forth on that a bit. So it's not on the org chart. We'd need to write a job description. It's just the earliest ideas of, we think that's the best path forward. But there's some more work to do. OK. So and in terms of like, I mean, you kind of started this by saying that this person would be kind of a specialized person in some ways. Yes. So but then as a part-time person, a lot of times part-time people have
- hourly wages, not salary wages, so what are you thinking right now in terms of the salary for that position? We would need to do some research on that because it is a new role for us. HR would need to do some market research on that. We'd wanna talk to the county, especially since we're asking someone to start from scratch and not come in and kind of maintain an existing system. It's a little different than that, but in talking with the emergency management people at IU, they suggested 20 hours a week
- And so we put $50,000 in the budget, assuming that that person would also need equipment or maybe something else, or maybe that's not quite the right number. But it's often retired firefighters or personnel that take on that kind of role in other places I've heard. OK. And then, oh, no, you answered my other question. Thank you.
- Thank you for your presentation. Can you talk a little bit about the expected output on a day-to-day basis for the legislative affairs specialist? So that person keeps quite busy. That person sits in on all kinds of meetings, not just boards and commissions at the city, but also at the county, watches some of those and also tracks state and federal legislation and keeps every other
- I think it's every other week, but also on an urgent basis, we get a digest that says, here's what's happening that we should be aware of on these various boards and commissions. Here's an issue that arose. Here's something the county talked about that we should be aware of and responding to. He also helps us with board and commission appointments, vetting those, making sure that folks get appointed in timely fashion, working with the staff liaisons to see what their recommendations are.
- and works a little bit with us with cabinet creating agendas for cabinet meetings and communicating information to them as well. That's very helpful, thank you. And how does the Director of Communications and the department PIOs work together to ensure consistent city messaging? So each department has a person who is there
- their public information officer. Often that person is not a communications or media specialist. It's someone who has another full-time job who has been tapped by the department to also be the person who does their social media or who, when they need a press release, writes one or who just generally is the contact for the communications director. And this is similar to the model we have set up, for example, with HR. HR has what they call HR partners in each department that help us make connections.
- So the main task at the moment besides some ongoing work to vet and review people's
- press releases and their social media posts and giving them guidance and advice on how to do that in the best way and to send them out for them, reminding them of branding guidelines and things like that, is working on the new website. And so those folks are responsible for gathering a lot of information from their departments about what they do, what kinds of requests they get from the public, what information they wish people knew that isn't out there, what points of frustration they have or that they've heard from the public needs to be
- Better communicated through the new website and so they are providing all of that information that will inform our new site next year Thank you. I submitted a couple other questions online. Thank you. Good great For deputy mayor now councilmember, sorry
- Thank you so much, Deputy Mayor. I'm generally interested in this question of overlapping responsibilities from the office of the mayor. First, do you see that happening sort of across city offices, and what steps are you taking to improve that?
- Can you say more about that? So earlier I was talking about how we have, in my estimation, and maybe I'm just wrong, but you have the mic, I guess, is that there's this question of multiple offices reduplicating efforts. And so I'm into the question about an IO being in every single department as an example, every department having its own Facebook page, and so on and so forth. Can you speak to us a little bit about what efforts we're
- to reduce that duplication in terms of things that the Office of the Mayor controls? I look at it and I think our communications director looks at it through a user lens. So we have information that we want people to know, but more importantly, people have information they want from us and the way that we organize and sort information should be geared around the convenience and accessibility for our users. And so right now, what's historically happened over time, and this is true in lots of organizations, each department, sometimes each division,
- sometimes each program will develop their own social media campaign, their own social media accounts, build out pages on the website, sub pages, and it makes it very difficult if you're a user to know where to go and to be sure that you're getting all of the news. Lots of newsletters all on different platforms. There are cost savings there, there are efficiency savings there, but it's also just easier for residents if there is a one-stop shop where they can go to get information that's organized well. So I think there is
- everybody is working harder than they need to and less effectively to communicate information right now and we'll Wrap that up with a new website that gives some dedicated places where people can share information You don't have to have a social media account to see what's happening at the city a nice new dashboard for for example construction projects and Roads and sidewalks. How can you see what's happening in my district? What's coming up?
- What's the city investing in from an infrastructure standpoint? There's some really nice models out there and other municipalities to use. Okay. Thank you so much. And then, and then in terms of this somewhat related, but the question of foyers and we talked about being being part of the office of the mayor. My understanding was that it was legal. It does. It lives in legal.
- And they are the first stop, but like you report, it is a system where there are places where the request goes in and then it gets sent out to the various departments who are responsible for supplying the information. And so, for example, one challenge might be Hand gets tons of requests for rental inspections and some of the older documents were scanned into one giant PDF. So providing that information, which we have, is very difficult because of the nature of the data that Hand is working
- with. So there's a core problem there which has nothing to do with FOIA but impacts their success. That's time. Thank you. Any other questions for council members for Deputy Mayor Nepp from council members? All right, we'll open it up to public comment. Is there anybody in chambers or online who would like to make a comment? Has anybody raised their hand on zoom? Awesome.
- And I don't see anybody moving in here. Okay, we'll take it back to council members. Any comments? Closing comments. Council member, sorry. Thank you. I think generally, we talked about how part of the growing pains of this transition are going to be sort of us learning about what's going well, what's not going well, what we wanna improve on.
- I think that this is the the office of the mayor's budget illustrates an area where in moving forward I think that we've made a little bit of a.
- And I'm sorry, I'm not speaking good. But I think that we've taken a couple of steps back in some areas that we did really well last year. And namely, last year we identified a handful of priorities that the mayor had, for example, and transparency being one of them. And our questions, mine particularly, were about how do we know that we've done that well? Like actually talking about, I think we had taken a step towards defining outcomes, measurable goals, and so on and so forth.
- sort of feel like we've taken a step back into the broader, just like, yeah, generally, we're going to be transparent, right? And so that's just, I mean, just generally, as we were asking for feedback on how this process is going, I think just one thing that it's really easy for us, as much as we're worried about silos in the building, I think there's also sort of epistemological silos that we have that we think from a year to year, and we're not carrying on the sort of positive things from before. I know that all these
- conversations have happened. I know that you all know those. I'm just thinking that it's useful to hold ourselves accountable in this process because we think about things that we prioritize. I think that we need to hold ourselves accountable to how we're following through with those priorities so that next year we're not just having the same conversation. We're basically saying we care about transparency as an example. I think the same comment applies across the board to all the things both that we're going to hear and that we've heard.
- but just that I think in sort of those growing pains of this transition, that's just something to keep in mind, that we don't sort of lose the things that we've done well, or that we have made progress in that move, if you will. But otherwise, thank you. And also, I would note that there's a handful of areas where I think that there's been sort of clear decreases in the office of the mayor's budget, and I think that's notable. I think that a lot of, particularly council office, clerk's office,
- haven't made decreases in our day-to-day operating, which is maybe something that we all might look at, questionable whether the small pockets of money are the things that we're looking for to move the budget in either way, but very much appreciate those efforts. Thank you. Thank you. Any other council member comments? Council member Stossberg. Thank you.
- I guess I want to generally take my comment time to express support of that part-time role that is being proposed. I kind of have a question, kind of a lingering question of whether that should be in the office of the mayor as opposed to in another department. That kind of makes me wonder a little bit. I'm not sure how much that matters. But I think just in terms of a couple of things that have happened over in this term in terms of safety response and
- That threat against council and going well, what should we do and what should our procedures be and it and it? Was kind of a laborious week I'll say for me to kind of figure out what best practices should be and then try to communicate them to my colleagues So I really appreciate that idea of having a point person who I would know that I could turn to and be like hey I need help with this category of thing and I appreciate that and similarly there have been other times where there have been citywide
- Emergencies or you know, especially with weather unexpected kind of stuff that sort of thing where I've kind of gone like, okay What should my role right now be in terms of response as a council member? And so I think that that that also could be You know, I just want to make sure in terms of that proposed a part-time role that the safety plans for facilities staff and then also
- elected officials, and I'm sure that that's in there implied, but just because that is kind of this lingering question for me personally, especially as a new member going, I don't want to get in anybody's way, but I also want to make sure that if there's something that I can do to be supportive that I am.
- And so I think that this role could really help clarify some of those pieces and also make sure that we as a city, a city with a big C and also all of the people who are a part of the city with a big C will know what to do in different moments and then that will just aid everybody's response and residents recovery. So yeah, that's my comment, thank you.
- Thank you, any other comments? I don't see any council member comments. All right, thank you very much for that presentation. Next we will hear the budget presentation from the Office of the Controller from Controller McClellan. Good evening, Council. Controller McClellan to present the controller's office budget to you.
- The controller's office is under high performing government. We don't deliver direct services to the public like fire and police, but we are one of the backbones of delivering services to the public by supporting all the departments in the city. And so that is why we are in high performing government. Some achievements that have happened this year are completing their 2023 audit.
- We have begun work on the 2024 audit, and we have started to implement priority-based budgeting in efforts to help streamline the budget process. 2026, we are looking to immediately start standardizing our procurement and purchasing procedures. We need to streamline the reporting of our federal awards that is part of our audit.
- And we need to start monitoring our budget immediately in 2026 and looking at 2025 actual expenses to get ready to budget for 2027 with our reduced revenues. So we do have some revenue ideas for the upcoming year. Municipalities can pass a municipal wheel tax and surtax.
- That will add funds available to the street department for road funding. We need to do an increase to sanitation rates, and that would come to council. Sanitation has been working on what they would suggest that would be to cover costs. And parking is going through a very comprehensive feasibility study and rate study right now. They will also come to council with suggestions for what the rates should be.
- We need to analyze our user fees and fines and violations and how those line up with the services being provided and the severity of the things that we are finding for. And we don't want to penalize people too much, but we do want to deter the action that we're actually trying to deter. And it's a very philosophical discussion. Do fees act and fines actually do that? That's not a discussion for tonight, but that is an idea of something that we could look at.
- And then overall, our overall revenue is heavily dependent on people living here, because if they live here, no matter where they work, their local income taxes will support the units in this county. And so the more people we have living here and working here, the better. Lit will still continue to be a huge part of our revenues, and it's one that we actually do have control over through economic development and housing. Did I?
- Did I miss something? Nope, probably, yep. All right, so in the controller's budget, I, let's see here, made a mistake. I submitted these slides before I entered in what my numbers actually were. So that is my mistake. I wondered, hang on. All right, we did make some,
- There's an addition to the controller's budget in the inter-fund transfers. I moved some transfers that we had been doing in other departments' budgets into the controller's budget, because we do those transfers. We manage those transfers. It wasn't an increase in actual money transferred from the general fund to the other funds. I just moved them into the controller budget.
- But actual reductions we would we reduced instruction and travel lines by a cumulative $7,100 we reduced the management fees workshops and consultants line by $95,000 and we reduced our office supplies line by
- $5,100. And the reason that we have those expenses, especially consultants, is that we need to have access to informed decision making. And as a municipality, we rely heavily on consultants that have experience in all kinds of things that we may only do once a year or once every two years. And it's extremely valuable to have the access to those consultants. So I just want to point out that we did see some
- Savings in the consultants line because we weren't using as much as we were budgeting, but it's still a very very valuable expense for us long-term financial stability Finding advantages and in the new debt structure We're gonna have to talk to bond council and have a lot of meetings with bond council to really understand what the new debt
- climate is going to mean for us and how to use that to the best of our advantage. And then evidence-based project evaluation. So every project
- we have is a big project and has big fiscal impacts and impacts to our community, the safety of our community and the transportation effects of our community. And so the Controllers Office supports parts of that, of those feasibility studies, mainly the financial feasibility parts of those studies. And so we still want to have those evidence experts or those actual case studies from experts to come. So we are making those budget reductions,
- we hope to not lose any functionality in our office. I think that is my last slide. Yes, that is my last slide, so I'm happy to take questions. Thank you very much. Any questions from council members? Down this end. Council member Piedmont-Smith. Yes, could you?
- Controller McClellan, can you go back to the evidence-based project evaluation that you had on your previous slide? Yes. Yes. Can you maybe give an example? I'm trying to understand what that is. Well, OK. So if you're thinking, if we're thinking about our building new housing in Summit,
- It's a big development, and there aren't very many that have been that big, but we need to know from experts who have been through the process that negotiators come to the table wanting something. And they have the experience of being able to tell us, first, you need to offer what we can offer, what should be first on the table.
- What I mean by evidence for the controllers office is evidence of how negotiations of financial transactions work and work well and work efficiently and so when we're when we're negotiating with developers on very complex transactions like we consider that.
- those case studies that they may bring to us as evidence. You're gonna get the best results and you're gonna get results that mirror what other cities may have gotten in your situation because we've been there. So that's the evidence, the consultant, we've been there. So that's the kind of evidence that I'm talking about. Thank you. I have one more. Can you specify the inter-fund transfers that were moved out of public works in hand and into your budget?
- Yes, I have that. We moved. We moved. We moved the Jack Hopkins fund transfer of 500,000 from hand to the controller's office. We moved.
- The alternative transportation fund, the sidewalk committee is funded by a transfer of $500,000. That's in our budget. The vehicle replacement fund is funded partially on trade in value of vehicles, but that doesn't really come to us as cash. It comes as a decrease in the cost of the next vehicle you're purchasing in. And so that fund has also always been funded by a transfer.
- two hundred and two thousand five hundred dollars So we've got all trans sidewalk vehicle replacement fund Jack Hopkins fund and this year we had to add a transfer for the fiber connectivity fund The ITS department is going to talk we'll be able to talk more about the fiber connectivity fund But the meridium agreement the developer agreement we have with meridium includes a clause where the city is going to fund a million dollars of
- high speed broadband connection for low income customers. And so that's what that funds. Thank you. Any other questions? Council Member Stossberg. I just want to follow up on that for a minute while we're talking about it. So what's the advantage of moving those things into the controller's line? It's purely easier to remember to do them because it is in our budget.
- It's easier bookkeeping to have the transfers in one place. And also I was getting some feedback from departments that was on the long lines of like, this transfer is in our budget and it makes our budget look huge. That's not money that we spend, it's just an expense out of our budget to another fund. It's not truly an expense of ours, so departments didn't really like having it in their budgets either.
- So to clarify something like the Jack Hopkins, because HAND basically administers that, so it goes from council office fund to HAND and then out, or what do you mean by that? No, it's in the general fund, and all the departments have a budget in the general fund. Council, controller, HAND, and we need to move it from the general fund, because it's cash in the general fund, to the Jack Hopkins fund. And once it's in the Jack Hopkins fund, council has a budget in that fund,
- And HAND must have a, I can't remember exactly if HAND has a budget in that fund or how that administration works, but. They'll still administer it. It doesn't change any of those. It doesn't change anything about that. Nobody should actually see a difference, notice a difference. Okay, and I guess the other category of question I had is that it looks like
- there were all kinds of things zeroed out of the general funds for the controller's office, but maybe put into the ED lit instead. So I guess I just want to understand a little bit about how, I guess that changes the source of funding maybe. I just want to understand. Yeah, some of our budget was kind of split half and half or split
- I'm not sure it was exactly half and half between ED lit and general fund. And it was just, it causes a lot of confusion for our budget. So we were trying to clean things up and we put the rest of our budget in ED lit. And I also did that with human resources, had some, and a few others. I think one other, I think ESD. ESD also got a lot of their budget moved into ED lit. Okay.
- Because like my understanding is with the SE1, then the ED lit's gonna, are we gonna keep ED lit or is that gonna disappear? So is this just like, we're just gonna have to change funds again at some point when ED lit disappears? Yeah, we would have to change, we would have to move it back to a different fund definitely by 2028. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. Any other questions? From council members.
- All right, no questions, we will go to public comment at this time. If anybody in chambers or on Zoom would like to make public comment, speak now or forever hold your peace. Has anybody on Zoom raised their hand? No. All right, and nobody in chambers is moving, so we will move to council member comment. Any comments? Council member Rallo.
- Thank you. Thank you controller McClellan and I I don't take issue with your budget whatsoever, but I did want to react to a comment that you made which is that Increasing housing development and increasing development in the community would add more tax revenue and therefore is is a good thing and I want to push back a little bit to say that
- Of course, we know that running a city isn't cheap. There are many, many costs involved, and as I've been on the council, the cost of the city budget has gone up over time above just inflation. Because we've added new personnel, we've had to expand infrastructure. With new development comes increased services, like fire and police, sanitation, increased infrastructure.
- water production, stormwater, schools, and then you have costs that are somewhat hidden, but apparent to many people, which is crowding, pollution, crime, and loss of green space. There was a study done in Elbermar County, Virginia, which indicated that actually increase in development made the community poorer. That is, the tax revenue did not match
- the expenses of the new development. So you're forever like the Red Queen trying to run in place faster and faster to stay exactly where you are and you're actually falling behind. So a lot of communities besides Elmer County in California for instance have taken on studies, nexus studies they're called which are
- estimate incremental costs associated with new development and with the idea that these costs should be internalized to developers. Instead, the cost is borne by existing residents in higher taxes, fees, charges, and so forth. So I think we have to be judicious about the type of development that we aim for in the community.
- There are other ways to develop economically. For instance, recirculating wealth in the community. There are a number of ways in which that could happen without just simply increasing the size of Bloomington. And we ought to seek these studies that determine is the cost being borne by the incremental cost being borne by the developer or is it being
- eventually going to result in higher taxes or higher fees for for existing residents So that's a discussion for later, but I did want to take issue with that a bit because I see things a bit differently And I look forward to a discussion in the future Any other council comments Councilmember rough
- I want to agree with on what councilman Barallo just said, you know it the assumption that that new development is going to pay the additional costs that are Result to the community as a result of trying to serve that new development Is not really a valid it's not an assumption we should make
- We need to take a hard look whenever someone asserts that and pushes any kind of policy based on that assumption. The other thing I want to say is early when the presentation included some potential sources of new revenue or revenue sources, wheel tax, surtax, user fees, fines for violations, I just really want to be
- emphasize that any new sources of potential revenues like that really need to be, we need to be sure they're not regressive. That in any way possible, we can make sure that those folks who are most impacted by having to pay those kinds of costs
- It's disproportional, and it's just gonna contribute. If it's not a progressive way of generating some revenue, it's just gonna exacerbate the growing separation in this country, and certainly even in Bloomington, we have it too, of those with relatively higher incomes and those with stagnant or even decreasing relative to the cost of living.
- Incomes and so so any anything like like any fees or taxes or fines or like that? Really I encourage the administration to take a super hard look and do a thorough analysis of of how to make how to use those kinds of potential revenues to maybe do just the opposite of increasing the opposite of increasing the
- inequalities in income that we see and figure out ways to use them to decrease, decrease that wide gap and inequality we see growing and growing and making it harder and harder for people on the lower end while people at the higher end accumulate more and more wealth and associated political power, et cetera. That's it, thank you. Thank you. Any other council member comments?
- Okay, that concludes that. Thank you very much. Next, we have our presentation from the legal department. So representing the legal department, I see Attorney Rice making her way to the podium. Good evening. I'm Margie Rice. I'm the Corporation Counsel for the City of Bloomington. And I'll go through my slides first and then talk about my numbers and my budget, which are frankly not very exciting.
- So we'll hopefully focus on some other things first. If we could go to the next slide. Oh, I have the clicker, okay. Fancy, okay, great. Ooh, I'm in control, I love that, thank you. So the legal department is outlined by statute in the Indiana Code. So I always like to joke, it's a little legal joke. I say a second class city,
- you know a legal department for a second-class city is defined in and Described in Indiana code 36 for 912, but I consider us a first-class city. We are really not by statute We're second class, but we're really first class. But anyway, um Our duties are prescribed by statute So we manage litigation It really says manage all the legal affairs for the city and
- We negotiate settlements. We are really loath to file litigation. We often have to defend ourselves in litigation. We sometimes file suit, but we take that very seriously and try not to do it if we don't have to. And when we do have litigation, we try our hardest to settle it and to work with the other side. And sometimes, believe it or not, filing suit is sometimes the quickest way to get to a solution.
- because we have great judges and a great judicial system that can help us. We do prosecute ordinance violations and other violations of the municipal code. We collect monies owed to the city. We have eight full-time attorneys, a paralegal and an administrative assistant that serve the legal department. I've always thought it's very interesting that the city of Bloomington and Monroe County government
- both have traditionally for decades invested heavily in municipal lawyers. I don't know if it's because we're kind of an activist litigious kind of community or and get sued a lot. Again, not that we initiated but we often are defending or if it's just
- Makes good sense because if you compare you know the hourly rates of a municipal lawyer versus the hourly rate of a you know private practice lawyer. The private practice lawyers rates are pretty high lot of small towns just do a contract with a law firm, but I think.
- probably Monroe County and Bloomington has been pretty fiscally conservative and decided it was more reasonable to build an in-house legal team. So we're really considered one of the larger law firms in Bloomington with these numbers.
- I'm just going to go through the attorney assignments so you can kind of get an idea, because I don't know that I've ever done that in a budget presentation. So I'm the corporation counsel. I handle the mayor's office, the controller's office, work with the department heads, handle the lead on union contracts, do the office administration. And this isn't a completely exhaustive list. Handle lobbying, things that come up like Showers West.
- That gets sort of added to my plate. But we really do work collaboratively as a group of lawyers. Audrey Brittingham was just recently appointed to the city attorney position when Larry Allen left. She handles human resources, is assigned to public works, and economic and sustainable development. Now, we've switched assignments, and we periodically review these, depending upon people's interests, whether we want to cross train,
- and whether or not somebody's schedule changes. For example, we had somebody who has a young child and Board of Public Works meetings were getting to be kind of a lot in addition to like Animal Commission meetings were also evening. So Audrey volunteered to switch and take Public Works. And so we made a switch in that case.
- Chris Wheeler has been here. I hired him the first time I was here as corporation counsel, and he has stayed. He's a great lawyer. He handles utilities, which is a big job. He handles the Board of Public Safety and our new fire merit commission. He also loves litigation. So he's, you know, I don't want to say he's an odd bird, but because, you know, there are people who love litigation, but he's good at it and he's very thorough and he really leads. We have a litigation team that gets together every Wednesday and goes over our cases.
- kind of any updates where we're at on stuff. Every Wednesday, we do that, and Chris leads that. Alex Pratt is assigned to engineering parks. She does a lot of our Title 15 work, which is engineering-related. She does public acquisition and our BUEA. Anna Holmes is a new attorney. She and Anna Deena started actually on the same day.
- She handles ITS, our conflicts of interest and ethics, living wage, and she does federal funding. She was an attorney in Dallas for most of her career and worked for the city of Dallas, and she did a lot of federal funding for them. And Adina is board of race here in Bloomington, went to IU Law School, went out to Vegas, and was a police officer for a little bit. So when she came back and we were able to hire her,
- we put her, assigned her to police. She likes that and she also does fire and planning. She's also somebody who enjoys litigation, planning, you get your share of litigation. Taylor Brown was in the mayor's office and once he passed the bar, we hired him. He handles hand, our public records requests, and he is assigned to risk. He has a background in emergency management, so he's good at risk. And then Dana Kerr also
- He's our newest attorney who was hired. He's practiced law here in Bloomington for a while, but he is handling RDC, which he had some background on, CFRD, and transit. Transit, by the way, is not a city department, but we provide legal services for them through a contract. A huge, and I'm sorry about the spacing on this one, 654 should be over to the left a little bit, but anyway.
- Year to date, I know that bothers me. Year to date, we have done 654 contracts. So if we keep pace with that, we're going to exceed the contractual numbers for 2024. This may be something as simple as a little grant agreement, or it can be a complex AIA contract for building a new building. But you can see we did 905 contracts in 24, and lower numbers in 22 and 23. But we are doing a lot of contracts
- And that, you know, I'd like to say that there was like a set period of time for doing contracts, but they're all different. We do our best to try to get them out the door, but there are a lot. I wanted to give you some information about public record statistics, and I think this goes to some questions that Councilmember Asari talked about with transparency.
- Year to date, we have had 358 requests. In 24, we had 570. Now in 23, I'm told in like May of 23, we got the next request system. So we haven't had it all that long. And not every single request for public records comes through next request. Some of them just come through a phone call or an email. But we have so far this year had about 358 requests. Our average response time, thanks to Taylor Brown,
- Is going way down in 23. It was And again Taylor compiled these stats. I don't think it's self-serving. I think they're real but But he did he's gotten the time down to nine point seven one days on average responding to public records requests now that's not the time that we like to
- Say hey thank you for your public records request this is actually getting the records some requests take longer they take more thought and as like Deputy Mayor Knapp said sometimes. It seems like an easy request but because of the format in which we have the information it's harder to produce the records little snapshot on the left corner.
- Just because we didn't do 23 because again we didn't we only had um next request for a month in june of 23 But you can see from june of 24 to june of 25. We have dramatically reduced the response time for public records request and when I think about um high-performing government, which is the category that we're 100 in or 100 of our budgets in that um, I think of trying to be people oriented, you know, I think of like
- Abraham Lincoln, his quote about government of the people, by the people, and for the people. It's really about people. And so we're trying to be as responsive as we possibly can and get information to people in a way that is helpful to them. So I'm going to share a little information about litigation. I'm not going to obviously talk about litigation here in public. That's the one reason we have.
- We get to have executive sessions to talk about litigation in that setting. But I want to give just kind of a highlight of kind of what we have going on in litigation. And most of these cases are ones that we're defending. We have a case still in federal court that's been pending for many years. It's the Turning Point case. We did just get a favorable summary judgment on part of that case. But we still have a couple of things that
- may have to go to trial. We're seeing how that goes. The two Indiana Supreme Court cases are annexation cases, and I do want to remind everybody that we... Oh, my gosh, are you kidding me? Wow, okay. So I would have... I wasn't even paying attention. I could talk to you people all day long. It's so much fun up here. And we'd be happy to listen if we didn't have a long guest list. Okay, all right.
- Thank you very much for that presentation happy to answer any questions any questions from Okay council members Thank you for your presentation Moving forward. How does the legal department plan on keeping the council informed of the annexation lawsuit? I think that obviously the
- We're gonna have oral argument tomorrow in one of the cases and then we have another one in October. We can have executive sessions with Both branches of government if that is something the council would like when we get opinions. We'll obviously share those I'm happy to answer answer any questions that you guys might have Thank you since we're defendants on the
- petition, I guess it would be nice to have more consistent updates. Yeah, be happy to do that. Thank you. And how has the legal department looked into using AI to increase its productivity? That's a great question. Rick Dietz and I have a meeting to actually talk about AI. I'm very worried about it myself, but that's me being a lawyer and being a nervous Nellie. And but Rick and I just last week touched base and said, you know, we need to talk about that. That's great. Thank you. Councilmember Rallo.
- Speaking of First congratulations for the public records request time. Thank you reduction. That's wonderful So how much is it is there an amount earmarked for annexation litigation in terms of outside council? Yeah, no, we have outside council. That's in our oh three budget our it's our really our largest number it goes for all outside council and
- Look at that, but so it goes to pay things like bond council opinions You know just not bond. Oh, oh you got that. Thank you Okay at nine hundred and seventeen thousand eight hundred dollars, but I did want to tell you guys that year-to-date
- I still have, and that's what I had last year, 917,800. Year to date, I still have 689,151 in my budget. So I'm very frugal. I don't spend it if I don't have to. So how much of that 917 would go to specifically for I would say Council for Annexation? I don't know that number off the top of my head, but I can get that to you. I can get that number. Okay, great. Thanks. I would say the majority of that would have gone to
- Annexation, okay Council members councilmember Piedmont Smith Corporation council I was wondering and this may be a question for the controller But there's a budget sheet in the packet in under your department called self insurance Yes, and I wonder what that is and whose salaries come from that Yeah, so we have if you're looking at
- The legal budget, let me look here. We have liability, casualty, premiums, and risk. That's the risk budget. You're looking at the one that says self-insurance. That's the risk budget in total. And under the 03 category, we have liability and casualty, premiums, and workers' compensation and risk. Those are really the two biggest numbers in our budget. But when it says 7704 self-insurance, that's just our risk budget.
- Where does that money come from? That's mostly general fund. So do other departments pay into that? Yes. So all departments pay into the risk fund based on what number of personnel? Just to summarize it, they pay into it if they have employees that are covered by the liability and workers comp insurance.
- Our risk manager does an allocation every year to basically charge back the departments for how much our insurance costs us. So the bigger departments that have, because we secure the insurance, and we are self-insured for workers' comp, but we secure insurance for other things. And so there's a complex formula that is done. Gary, our risk manager, works with the controller's office and charges that to the departments, and then we pay our insurance premiums with those.
- personnel category in this fund is for Gary it's for yes, we have and if I hadn't talked so long I would have gone on to a slide that told you about that, but we have a risk manager and Director of safety and training and another administrative person in the risk division You said risk manager and risk manager director of safety and training and then an administrative assistant and
- And they do training and they secure the insurance and all that kind of stuff. Okay, thank you. Councilmember Stossberg. Thank you. I want to go back to a little bit about what Councilmember Rallo was asking about with the special legal services fund. So in 2025, just to let me repeat to make sure
- we communicated effectively, there was $917,800 budgeted and so far, like you still have about $600,000 of that left and that that's mostly gone to like outside legal service contractor kind of stuff, mostly for annexation this year. But next year in 2026, you've also budgeted that same amount for that. So I guess I'm kind of wondering like, and that's a huge bump from 2024 where the actual amount was, you know, 300 and something and 2023 is 300 and something. So do we really need to budget 900 and something for that?
- Especially if annexation might be wrapping up. Yeah, I think we do and I mean again I'm not gonna get ahead of myself but on annexation Depending upon what happens at the Supreme Court. You can always go to higher courts after that I think some of the issues especially the constitutional issue is is important enough for Indiana municipalities and municipalities across the country so
- I'm not gonna rule out any additional litigation on those important issues. So I do think it's important to budget that. Again, if we don't spend it, it reverts, and I'm very careful about who we hire and what we hire outside council for. I'd like to do as much in-house as possible. Obviously, we already had outside council going on annexation, and annexation is a really unique issue that
- pretty much need a specialty lawyer for, just like bond counsel. We also have hired recently Scott Chen, who used to be the city of Indianapolis Corporation Council. He's with the law firm and he's helping us with some convention center related issues and negotiating some matters there. So it's good, much like the controller said, it's nice to have those funds when you need it for expertise.
- It's a very, you know, we have a very complex large city. I like to have that amount in there just in case I need it. If I don't have to spend it, I certainly won't. But given the kind of complex cases we have pending, I think it's important to have it in there. Okay, thank you for that information. Any other questions? Okay, I don't see any other questions. So I will open it up for public comment. Thank you.
- Anybody in chambers or on Zoom? Please make yourself known if you would like to make comment. Anybody on Zoom raising their hand? No. No, and nobody here in chambers looks interested. So, okay, we will move back here to council comments section. Anybody have comments? Council Member Stossberg.
- Thank you. I just want to talk again about that contractual legal services kind of category that we just talked about because partly because this budget adds
- up to $30,000 into the council budget for similar sorts of things, though it's also expanded not just for outside legal services, but also for assistance with the liberation session stuff and training stuff. So I just want to point out that if we think right now about having $30,000 in the council budget for this category of thing, we have over $900,000 in our legal department budget for this kind of thing. So I just wanted to state that and put it into perspective, not that I'm challenging either one of those numbers,
- just that I'm kind of putting that what is a council office increase into a little bit of perspective in terms of what city legal supports and has been doing in terms of sometimes needing outside resources for specialized assistance with various things. So thank you very much. Thank you, Attorney Rice for your presentation. Any other comments?
- That wraps up this section. Thank you very much. So moving on to the presentation from Human Resources Department. Presenting for Human Resources tonight is Dr. Paycheck.
- Good evening, Council. My name is Char Paycheck, Director of Human Resources. Thank you for this opportunity to share more about the past, the present, and the future of HR in 10 minutes. HR supports city employees and departments by creating policies and programs to help employees succeed. We provide guidance and tools to help managers lead effectively. We support the full employee cycle from hiring to exit.
- Our role is to keep systems running smoothly so the city performs at its best. HR has three main functional areas, talent and engagement, compensation and benefits, and employee relations and operations. Each area has a lead managing daily work while I focus on strategy aligned with the office of the mayor's vision and priorities. Next, I'll share 2025 highlights from each area.
- and 2026 HR strategic plans to support a high-performing government. I do want to note that the 2026 HR budget only reflects decreases, deductions. No categories demonstrate an increase. Okay, for talent and engagement, our first functional area, in 2025 we launched the citywide
- Onboarding tool through neo gov to give all new employees all new hires a stronger start instead of processing manual paperwork We're using technology to make onboarding more efficient We're also creating an HR and departmental landing pages so new hires can easily find key information to support their success and
- By popular demand, we're creating a more complete first year onboarding program with quarterly training on benefits and city values, positive communication, and how to use Google tools, plus a welcome from the mayor. The comprehensive onboarding will include check-ins at 30 days, 60 days, and 90 days, and beyond, to ensure the onboarding process is going well within each department.
- We've improved recruitment and branding by making videos and updating job ads to better highlight our departments and our various roles our average time to hire new employees is 70 days, which is
- better than the Neo Gov's data, which shows that the public sector average is closer to 240 days. But there are other HR sources that show industries can average filling positions within 40 to 44 days. So obviously there's still room for us to improve our process. Later this year, you can look forward to seeing our best videos, which stands for Belonging, Engagement, Storytelling, and Thriving.
- The videos will amplify employees' voices on what makes the city of Bloomington a great place to work. We introduced new hire swag to make employees feel welcomed, build early connections, and support a stronger sense of community. Finally, we hosted employee events like Coffee with the Mayor, staff appreciation luncheons, and we also co-hosted an intern networking luncheon to help all employees feel valued and connected.
- For a high performing government, the talent and engagement team is thriving and has really stepped up this year, especially by taking on special projects to support classification and compensation work and helping to see them through to completion.
- I'd like to build on that momentum by having these teams give more hands-on support to departments so we can keep improving how talent is recruited, hired, onboarded, and engaged all using best practices. Some highlights for compensation and benefits team.
- We completed the civil city salary study for nearly 400 employees. Those grade and step adjustments were made using updated and consistent policies. As a part of our ongoing AFSCME contract negotiations, we're working with consultants to review union positions. This will help us build a pay structure that is manageable.
- data-driven, and aligned with best practices, so we stay competitive and show that we value AFSCME employees. On pay transparency, we know not everyone agrees and fully understands with what we have implemented so far, but we followed a consistent process. We've used expert guidance, and we base our decisions on data.
- We continue to be open to more conversations and want to bring more voices into that process. This includes a deeper look at how we write and review job descriptions, which is connected to our 2026 goals. On benefits, we focus on helping employees understand and use what's available. We held a benefits fair, hosted an HR town hall, and now we offer regular briefings with HR partners and employees.
- When employees understand benefits, they use them more and they stay more engaged, so this helps us attract and retain talent. As noted in the HR overview memo, we're seeing positive trends in benefits use. We've increased our utilization of the Marathon Clinic
- We have stronger participation in our education reimbursement benefit, and we have growth in our 401k and other retirement programs, including our matching programs. For high performing government, the compensation and benefits team is a key part of HR. It's responsible for total rewards, so that includes pay, benefits, and all other incentives.
- To do this well, the team needs the right mix of skills and technology. With one open position and some upcoming transitions, I'm still working through how to best structure that team. For employee relations and operations,
- We released a fully updated employee handbook, replacing the version from 2014. The updated handbook reflects staff input and focuses on clarity and accessibility. It's now online with a feedback tool where employees can submit questions or concerns. Subcommittees provide input when policies need to be reviewed or updated.
- In partnership with Invigorate HR, we piloted a project lead for 30 managers to have training focused on communication, coaching, trust, and accountability. Feedback from the pilot will guide future supervisor trainings because strong leadership builds strong teams.
- Invigorate HR is also working with cabinet members to improve communication and coaching to help create better workplace environments. We collected employee feedback through best places to work and a survey that was a follow-up Pulse survey. The survey results were shared in July and reviewed by the mayor to promote transparency and leadership. We also launched the Pay Action Committee, or PAC, in partnership with Baker Tility.
- Baker Tilly to review pay practices across departments like PTO, holiday and overtime pay and other benefits and incentives. The goal of this effort is to ensure pay practices are consistent, compliant and documented. This has been a collaborative effort with HR partners, payroll processors and department heads to assess where we are and where we need to go.
- Of course, no changes will happen without careful review and clear communication to ensure transparency and buy-in. PAC efforts will reflect a shift from ad hoc fixes and workarounds to more strategic and system-based solutions for our payroll practices. The Employee Relations and Operations team is a key role in strengthening our internal HR foundation.
- For a high performing government, I want this team to focus on improving HR policies and procedures, not just updating them, but making them clearer and more consistent and easier to use. I see an opportunity to enhance training, both based on the content that we offer and how we deliver training, so employees and managers feel better supported day to day. In 2026,
- We're looking ahead. In 2024, we focused on partnership, communication, and service. In 2026, we're focused on efficiency and understanding what we do. And in 2026, we'll focus on how we can work together as a smooth and effective system. So we have primary goals for 2026, which are focused on enhancing policy efficiency and consistency, developing a citywide workforce strategy,
- and supporting leadership growth to strengthen our workplace culture.
- To wrap up, we made some real progress in hiring compensation benefits, engagement, and leadership, but there's still more to do. In 2026, we'll focus on applying what we've learned to build effective systems for HR departments, employees, and overall city of Bloomington residents. I hope this presentation shows HR's commitment to supporting high-performing government, and I'm happy to answer any questions you may have. Thank you very much, Director Paycheck.
- Any questions from council council members who look? Thank you for your presentation Could you talk about the utilization rate of the marathon health clinic compared to how many people are eligible? So we're still working on that but we have seen some improvements when we first started we had some challenges because we went through a merger between Everside and marathon we also did not have the hours available and
- for the clinic when we first opened it, but we are improving how many employees are participating. I can follow up with you to get you some specific numbers on how that has actually increased, and I think I have some more details in the budget memo as well. Great, thank you. And I submitted a question on the, the same question on the website, so thank you. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions? Council Member Piedmont-Smith.
- Yes, Dr. Paycheck, in your memo, you said that part of the savings in Category 3 was from discontinuing the educational reimbursement benefit because of low return on investment. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Mm-hmm. So it was more of a right-sizing, I think, it's fair to say. We had a significant amount of money budgeted even previous to...
- me coming into this role, and we reduced it specifically to be more aligned with how much that benefit is utilized. So it was a reduction, but again, it's more of a right sizing to make sure that we only allocate as much to that program as employees are using it, but also giving us the opportunity to increase education and awareness so we hope to continue to increase utilization.
- $80,000 reduction, so how much remains for next year in that fund? I'll have to follow up with you on the answer specific to that question. I know thus far this year in 2025, we've used approximately $20,000 for that program, but it's reimbursement-based, and so as more education and courses complete, then we will receive requests for reimbursement.
- I think the answer to your question is 30,000 is left. Okay. Excellent, thank you. I have a unrelated question. Do you ever do exit interviews when employees leave? And in what cases do you do them and how does that work? This year, we have been a lot more intentional with doing exit interviews. Our Assistant Director of Human Resources, Hilary Kanyi,
- Conducts those performance interviews with whoever separates and is willing to talk to us Okay, so any level of employee is offered that opportunity Yes, all levels of employees and then that is that then? relayed back to the department head or
- I don't I wouldn't say that we've actually closed that feedback loop But what I will say is that I use the information to inform the HR strategy So when I make recommendations around training and programs and how we can improve our support services a lot of that comes from what I learned from the exit interviews But it would be a good idea to have that feedback loop Thank you Council members
- I just had a question about the reduction in consulting services. Is that primarily, like, were those consulting services this year primarily used for the salary study stuff and we just don't need those next year? Or were there other consulting things that have kind of been deliberately cut that then you've decided to work on in-house?
- The majority of it was related to compensation and classification so that we had a significant amount budgeted for CRO. And we don't anticipate that we would need CRO into 2026. Okay, thank you. Any other questions from council members? Okay, we will take it to the public then for comment. Anybody in chambers or on Zoom?
- Please let us know if you would like to make comment. Anybody on Zoom? No. Okay. And I don't see anybody here in chambers looking to do that. So we will keep it moving back to council for comment. Any council member comment? Council member Piedmont. I keep wanting to call you Piedmont Smith all night. I don't know why. Council member Sossberg. I have no idea why either.
- I'll take it as a compliment. I just wanted to highlight the fact that a significant portion of our budget is salaries, is people, and that is HR.
- overall costs a whole lot less to retain the people that we have already trained and who already know how to do these jobs and already have some kind of background and expertise. So I just kind of appreciate this concept of trying to be supportive to employees and trying to do what we can to help people understand their benefits and that whole calculation.
- in what I assume is an effort for people to retain employment with the city so that then we don't get stuck in like a training loop because that doesn't benefit anybody in that. So I just wanted to express appreciation for all the work that looks like it's being done in that arena by HR and led by you, Dr. Paychak. So thank you. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you.
- Next, we will hear our presentation from Information and Technology Services Department, and we have Director Dietz here, I believe, who will... Could we take a three, four-minute break or something? I don't know if everybody else wants to just power through, but... Anybody else wanna take a break? Just to... I mean, I can just get up and leave. I just don't want... I just don't want to take it personally. If you don't mind, Councilmember, sorry, we're gonna keep going, but...
- You can stretch your legs, thank you. Thank you, Director Dietz, for being here. I will not be offended. Hello, Council, and hello to everyone watching on CATS TV. I'm Rick Dietz, Director of Cities Information and Technology Service Department, more succinctly known as ITS. I appreciate the opportunity to present the 2026 ITS budget for your consideration.
- At ITS, our mission is to provide the IT services, tools, training, and resources necessary to maintain mission critical city systems, empower city staff to excel in their work, to expand digital opportunity in our community, and electronically engage our residents in their own governance.
- Our work in ITS is as much about people as it is about technology. We have a great team of creative technologists, and I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge and commend the ITS team for their continuing hard work and excellent supporting our public and staff customers. As a matter of fact, we have two of our team members here, Mike Crump, Mike and Kelly from the ITS team. Thanks for assisting us this evening.
- Our work falls under two of the city's new priority-based budgeting areas, high-performing government for most of our operations, and economic development for our work addressing the digital divide.
- ITS provides a broad range of services across seven activity areas, administration, innovation process improvement and data services, enterprise applications management, geographic information systems and geospatial services, IT infrastructure, technology support and training, and broadband and digital opportunity initiatives. Other cross-cutting activity areas in ITS include our work in transparency and open data, digital accessibility, cybersecurity,
- and IT procurement. In the next few slides, I'll share our budget proposal and noteworthy changes from 2025. We're proposing the following budget across all ITS funds. In this slide, you can see the ITS budget broke down by category. The overall proposed 2026 ITS budget is $469,815.
- The twenty twenty six budget proposal includes increases in category one personal personnel services Category three other services with minor increases in category two supplies with a decrease in category four capital outlays and personnel Services the increase you see there
- is due to classification and compensation adjustments. No new FTEs are requested in 2026 in ITS. In supplies, we have modest inflationary increases. In other services, we also have inflationary increases in subscription and maintenance costs, increased use and license head counts for enterprise systems like Google, DocuSign, our permitting system and more.
- Continuing and other services we have increased investment in cyber security systems and services largely in response to the reduction in federal support in that area We have new and expanded systems for permitting assets asset management financial management including the priority based budgeting system
- And the addition of funding for the fiber connectivity fund and capital outlays we have work on our.
- ITS capital plan in 2026. We have copier replacement investments in our data centers, time clocks, and investment in enterprise HR information system, and also our annual workstation computer capital, computer capital replacement efforts. Next, we'll discuss a few of our major work areas and challenges.
- They include transparency and accessibility, broadband and digital opportunity, cybersecurity, infrastructure and facilities. And transparency and accessibility, openness, transparency and accessibility are critical to the proper funding of democratic government. We're actively working in the following areas to update the city's website in partnership with the Office of the Mayor and our broader city team,
- We're working to meet ADA Americans with Disabilities Act accessibility requirements for city websites and web applications. As a part of that effort, we are now finalizing, finishing our digital accessibility strategic plan, and we've been working hard to improve the FOIA public information request process.
- Monitoring the fiber broadband deployment and coordinating local digital opportunity efforts and grants are at the heart of our broadband and digital opportunity area. Meridian fiber construction, we anticipate a restart of that after the loss of the primary construction contractor in the coming weeks with network completion by the end of 2026.
- We unfortunately were announced and then had a grant, federal grant opportunity rescinded that we are recovering from and redoubling our efforts to improve digital opportunity within our community. This year we are working on a
- Update of our digital equity strategic plan and survey. We have digital equity grants awarded for will be awarded and in a couple of months for twenty twenty six and then we're we're looking forward to twenty twenty six and we're continuing to support our local digital opportunity coalition.
- In cybersecurity, we are working to maintain a continually evolving cybersecurity program to protect the city's assets. That includes
- Staff training and testing the rollout of multi-factor authentication deeper within the organization trying to do doing what we can to address the pullback of federal government funding for local government cybersecurity efforts, you know all the while under threat from external actors
- In infrastructure and security, we need to ensure that our systems continue to work reliably to support public safety and the continuous operation of the city. Support police, fire, the west showers and other facility projects, invest in the IU data center and carry out the elements of the ITS capital plan in 2026.
- Other challenges that we are working on are increasing demand for services, responsible application of new and emerging technologies, and funding uncertainty. We'll go ahead and move on to some of our budget changes that I want to highlight.
- We budget a number of different funds in ITS. The notable changes that I want to share with you are a shift from the general fund to ED lit for community access television services and category four, our capital outlays that were in the general fund. We continue to see a decline in the telecom non-reverting fund revenue that comes from cable TV,
- cable TV cord cutting. The funding for the fiber connectivity fund that was mentioned earlier is also a new item as well. And then I want to bring my presentation here to a close by
- saying thank you for your consideration of the 2026 ITS budget. We look forward to helping city staff meet their goals and potential with technology tools and support in 2026. And we appreciate the opportunity to serve our sister city departments as well as the Bloomington community. And with that, I would be happy to answer any questions that you might have. Thank you. Thank you very much. Any questions from council? Council Member Zulek.
- Thank you with the the revamping of the website. Are there any plans to make you report available in the form of an app? And if not, what would the lift be to make that work? We had previously this goes back a number of years had a freestanding native app for you report. We now have it as a
- web application that scales to mobile devices. So all of the functionality that would be in a native Apple or Android app are available through a web browser interface on your device. Any other questions? Council member Asari.
- Thank you so much, Director Dietz. So within the budget book that we've received, MITS is one of the largest increases, which got me thinking about whether or not there's been conversations about how we might leverage some of the investments that we're making to either create efficiency gains in other places across the city, but also whether we've looked at models for revenue
- I'm thinking particularly with our shared investment in fiber, for example. Is there some eventuality in the future where we might generate some revenue with some of the activities that we're doing? Thanks for the question. On the revenue side of things, we have not looked at a lot of revenue opportunities because
- I think largely they're elsewhere in the organization. It is possible there could be some opportunities within the context of our existing fiber infrastructure, but other than the Meridian project, there's not been commercial interest in utilizing our excess conduit, for instance. But let's talk about
- those opportunities, I think they're worth exploring. On the efficiency side, we have a number of investments. So one which seems maybe a little bit of somewhat contradictory, but we have increased license costs for a number of our applications, including
- including our permitting system. But the internal users for that are bringing permit processes which were paper-based and inefficient into a structured system that is much more efficient than previously. So there's a little bit of an offset cost for those investments. We are investing in efficiency.
- But sometimes those savings are occurring outside of the ITS budget because they're in you know enterprise applications I Don't have much time so I won't I'll ask to follow up a online for you. Thanks Councilmember Rallo Mr. Dietz, could you describe in some detail about the FTE that you are in need of?
- New hire. Oh, I'm sorry. There's no No new FTE. Oh, there isn't an ITS this oh, I thought you listed in your slide deck that I Must have misunderstood Okay, good. I Mean, thank you. Oh I've I've heard from my support team That there is a typo in the slide deck, but there but I said it's like a new new FTE Oh, yeah, so there's no new
- Yeah So now just just think about how madam an extra new yeah new new shiny new Thank you, we won't object if that's what you're proposing Any other questions councilmember Piedmont Smith yes, mr. Dietz in your memo in the budget book you talked about in the capital line investing in time clocks and
- Can you describe what that is? I mean, I know what a time clock is, but why is that in like a capital line? It seems like the time clocks I'm familiar with are all like web applications. Well, we have a number of time clock hardware that are placed in various places within the city. Their primary usage is in areas where there are
- where we have a lot of union employees that are clocking in and out. And so the hardware for that we need to make sure is secure and effective and reliable. So are these like old fashioned time cards? No, no, these are electronic devices that utilize city IDs that scan and then take in
- clock in or clock out action based on use of the city ID. Okay, so the IDs are scanned. Okay, I didn't know that. And then another question is, you mentioned, let me find it here, that there's an increasing demand for services from ITS. Who's demanding what kind of services? It was kind of vague.
- Throughout throughout the city our our customer base, you know, the more technology is used the more demand for support comes with that so for our help desk help desk calls for instance You know and then also, you know drop-ins at you know at ITS, you know and support for an increasing number of
- Software software systems for you know individuals to do to do their work Not necessarily that there are more problems among staff using software it's that they're
- There are more software and that there's more. I don't want to say say no. I mean there are issues that come with the deployment of of new and more diverse set of systems, but it is largely the number of individuals that are are using applications that and that need the applications to work for them and help them work for the public. OK, thank you.
- Any other questions? Down here? Oh, Council Member Stossberg.
- Thank you. I'm just looking at that consultants line again under other services and charges and just looking over time and going okay and in 2023 the actual was 165,000 and 2024 the actual was just under 70,000 and then in 2025 it was adopted 135,000 and then next year it's about the same at 125,000. So I guess I'm just wondering if you could tell us what that line has been used for this year and what the plan is next year in terms of your use with consultants.
- in that category, because it's just a, like, that's a big difference between the actual in 2023 and 2024. So I'm just trying to get a handle on how you guys are using that this year and what your plan is. I think I could probably give you a better report as a spreadsheet than right here, if you're asking for the... Okay, that's fine. I'll follow up with that question then on our comment. I'm happy to. You know, it varies significantly based on what projects
- are going on in a given year. Okay, okay, that'll be great. I will follow up then with a written comment and then just ask you then what the timeline of a new and improved website is then since I have extra time. I know that we're looking to make significant progress this year. As mentioned earlier, a lot of this effort is coordinated by the Mayor's Office Communications Director in partnership with us and the rest of the city.
- So I'm not. Okay, yeah, I was about to say, would Deputy Mayor Knapp like to come forward and announce and say it out loud? Next summer is the launch date, so we're building from scratch. Great, thank you. And there's a whole bunch of data dashboards to build. Thanks. And let me just make sure. Yeah, I don't have another one, thank you.
- We'll move to public comment then. Is there anybody in chambers or on Zoom who would like to make comment? Please raise your hand on Zoom. Make yourself known. Yes, there's one on Zoom. Excellent. Thank you very much. Please say your name, and you may begin. You have two minutes. OK, Kevin Keough, just a quick question or two. Is there a dedicated staff member within your staff that has
- focused on cybersecurity, lack of a better term, like a chief information security officer, and follow-up, do you follow a security framework? And I'm thinking like the NIST standards, particularly 853. Would that be something you guys do? Thank you. Thank you for that question, and since this is only time for public comment, I think maybe what we could do is put those questions in our
- questions to submit on the forum later so that we can get those answers for you. Thank you. Any other, anybody else on Zoom? Okay, thank you. And nobody else here in chambers. So we will move back to council for comment. Any final comments? Council member, sorry. I just want to say thank you first and foremost, you know, somebody who, I mean,
- Spend most of my professional time thinking about and studying local governments particularly investments in IT decision making around things like cyber security especially low resource context and I can say.
- you know, well, having worked with you all in so many other contexts, you know, how I think incredibly impressed we all should be and happy and proud of our ITS department. So thank you for your leadership and the amazing work that you do. I'm very excited to see the increased emphasis on cybersecurity. The one thought that I have in this sort of got at my questions, and I think that,
- being at the level that we are and of taking so seriously, I think, significant threats and helping keeping our everything moving well together sometimes is in tension with what I might sort of flippantly call innovation, right? And I think that sometimes we might, which is maybe a good thing, like if we're gonna err on the side of security or innovation, like err on the side of security, right? But I think that in years ahead, certainly maybe not
- something to have for this year, but I do think we should reengage in some of these conversations about there was once a position in the city called like innovation director or something like that. I think that that sort of ended up going in a direction that it didn't need to go in. But there's a lot of really interesting space for us, particularly right now, to be thinking about how we might develop technological solutions to sort of logjam issues across the city, how we might create more efficiency, how we might do gains in efficiency across
- the city and things that we can sort of create maybe in-house or work externally to create. And I'd really love to see that capacity built in to ITS. Every time I talk to people about, hey, why don't we do this? Why don't we do this other thing? They're always like, oh, we have to talk to ITS about it. But I don't think that we're actually built as an ITS department to do the type of things that I think all of us would want to be doing, which, again, is
- To our benefit in many ways when we talk about things like security particularly but anyway so so it's something just you know thinking out loud something that I'd love to see as I also talked last year about how I'd love to see that.
- that talk about as we move towards stronger outcome-based approach, we're going to need a lot more data capacity. I love the investment in the software and technology, but we also might need some human capacity to pair with what we have in the office of the mayor with our incredible deputy mayor who has those skills, but we need to spread those widely. Anyways, just again, thanking you for all the amazing work you do.
- comment from council councilmember Stossberg yeah I want to point out a couple things first kind of I just want to pull out this line in
- the budget book that we have local increases in cybersecurity systems largely due to a withdrawal of federal government support for local cybersecurity. And I just wanted to call that out out loud as kind of a local consequence of what is happening at the federal level and also call out out loud as Council Member Asari was kind of saying that cybersecurity is just incredibly important and like we cannot do without it because it would leave so many pieces of our government infrastructure very vulnerable if we
- did not have a very robust, solid cybersecurity. So I am glad that as a city, we are still able to manage to maintain those systems, even with that withdrawal of federal government support. But that is just a really big issue, I think, for local governments in general right now to not have that kind of support. And we're very fortunate in Bloomington that we can cover that in other ways. So I wanted to make sure to call that out. And the second thing that I wanted to make sure to call out was also an appreciation for ITS and just to highlight a couple of ways that ITS has
- been super helpful to counsel this year because there have been state changes related to our meetings, related to internally, we may have noticed that onboard changed in terms of managing boards and commissions because there are new requirements around agendas and how information is relayed. And ITS has been very helpful to clerk and council office to make sure that all of those changes are reflected the way that they are supposed to be and to be in compliance with that new
- law. Similarly, there were changes in streaming and saving of all the meeting records and things like that. And so ITS is also really instrumental in that. And then also calling out Community Access Television, CATS TV, because that is also just instrumental. It would have been a much bigger lift to comply with all that if we didn't already have some of those built-in relationships that we've had through our ITS and through CATS TV. And so that has just been really helpful in
- And I wanted to call that out as appreciation in terms of some of that work maybe that Director Dietz referred to in terms of that support and support requests as there have been a lot of that back and forth this year in making sure that that compliance was prepared so that we were obeying these new laws. And then next year with the ADA stuff, we can anticipate a little bit more of that probably too in making sure that everything is in compliance with new
- and upcoming laws, so thank you very much. Any other council comments? Council member Rallo. May I ask a question of Mr. Dietz? Can you please put it in the packet, in the Google Docs? What's that? In the Google Docs. We can put it in writing. Okay, I thought I'd give him the opportunity to respond to Mr. Kehoe's, but. Well, but yeah.
- We'll put those in the packet. Okay. Any other questions or comments? Sorry. All right. I think that closes that section. Thank you very much. So now, we will hear a presentation from Department of Public Works, and we have three different sections here. So starting us off, I believe under administration is Director Wason to kick off Public Works.
- Good evening members the council Adam waste and public works director for the city of Bloomington Always an honor to present our budgets, you know tonight's a little different It's not a full marathon of all seven divisional budgets in one night. We'll split those up over three nights now So I'm not sure if I like that more or less but just quick big shout out to deputy mayor nap and controller McClellan and
- While this was a different budget process than I've been through in all of my years in city government, they made it as easy as it could possibly be given all these big changes on how we're presenting the information. So thank you to them and really appreciate the hard work they put into this on behalf of the departments and divisions. Starting off with the Public Works Administrative Division. This is the small staff here at City Hall that does the strategic and administrative services for the department.
- We are a small staff of just
- five full-time, well, including myself, six full-time staff members. And this is across, this staff's the front desk at City Hall. This is our positions in our admin office across the hall here with our budget team, our budget manager, our special projects manager, and our office manager, as well as a special projects coordinator. We are a small staff, but we have big roles to fill here. The Board of Public Works meets every two weeks in our
- administrative division staffs that this is a board that is considered the chief administrative body of the city and so their packets are from ranging in from a couple hundred pages per meeting to four and 500 pages. We take items from almost all departments of the city at different times throughout the year and just a big heavy lift there. Some of the things that we really have focused on in 2025, it continues to be our accreditation process. So the American Public Works Association accreditation,
- is something we've been working on for several years and something that we will go through the actual review process next summer in 2026.
- We're also embarking on our efforts to get a site concept and design for a public works operation center. This is something we've been talking about for many years now. Our need to consolidate our activities to an operation center to not only bring our team together, but also put our teams in more modern facilities that meet their needs. Also here in 2025, throughout the year here, we've been focused a lot on our downtown efforts with our Brighton Bloomington program and our
- beautification efforts and partnerships with parks and recreation and other city departments. And we've also been making a big focus on our gateways into the city trying to keep those clean and inviting to the public that live here and visit on a regular basis.
- initiatives that we're looking at for 2026 We do have two new positions requested throughout the entire department one in the administrative division as a new deputy director for operations We are doing a lot of work with our pedestrian facilities So we're with the new Transportation Commission working to present to them a draft what we're referring to as a pedestrian facilities operation plan to get their feedback and really look at how we
- The operations and maintenance of our pedestrian facilities we've heard a lot in the last couple years about trying to pilot some efforts on snow removal from pedestrian facilities so we're going to give that a bit of an effort this year it is not going to solve all of our issues with snow on sidewalks but we're going to try some of our.
- high pedestrian facilities. In particular, I think we're going to try to focus on the Walnut Street corridor, where it's two ways south towards Winslow on the south side. Again, working on the operations facility. And I just want to take a note of all of the experience and knowledge we have amongst our staff that help meet our needs. Our team, while small, takes on big challenges in big ways. And they always look to innovate and do things with efficiency in mind.
- All right, some of our challenges and what we're looking at in 2026. It has been stated many times tonight, the impacts of the state legislation on city operations. This will be a big hit for our road funding. You know, we're still, we've got our estimates and we think we know what those impacts are gonna be, but even with the local road and street and the LRS and what's the other fund?
- Motor vehicle highway fund, you know, those projections are just that projections at this time we're hoping that it's not as big of a decrease as we're expecting but We're yet to see all that we're working with all the city departments our city fleet has grown over the years and we want to look to right-size that or become more efficient and how we manage the fleet and then
- working with the controller's office and others on our just different capital planning and purchasing. One other large thing that we'll talk about more with our sanitation budget is we're reviewing the rates for that and we'll look to bring new rate structure in front of the council and the board of public works in the next several months to eliminate that long standing general fund support to the sanitation division and make that holy repair supported.
- Beyond that, we just want to make a couple notes. The team was recognized by Downtown Bloomington, Inc. at their annual meeting this year for our efforts in coordination with Brighton Bloomington and Centerstone and our downtown beautification efforts. So big thanks to our whole team on that. And just want to leave you with a note. We talk a lot about high performance government tonight. That's the category. With public works, and for a long time now, we've talked about, at first it was always three categories or three focus areas, but now it's become a fourth.
- well but our whole our whole intent and our whole
- way in which we try to approach things as a whole department is that we're going to be good stewards of the taxpayer resources we're entrusted with. That always wasn't the case with Public Works in the past. Some things happen, and that's always been a focus of ours. We want to steward the resources we are entrusted with in ways that benefit the community for the long term. We're going to operate in an environment of respect. That's both internally and externally, whether it's with a coworker or colleague or supervisor or when we interact with residents and visitors.
- We're gonna try to provide the highest levels of public service we can. We're not gonna meet that standard every single day. When we fail, we're gonna try to do better, but we're gonna try to just provide the highest levels of service that we're responsible for. And the fourth one we've added over the last couple years is we're gonna try to do that all as safely as possible. So when I think of high performance government, I think all four of those aspects of what we focus on in public works really apply. I've done three minutes earlier. I should have given those to Margie.
- I will take any questions you may have. Thank you very much for that presentation. Any questions from council members? Council member Piedmont-Smith. Yes, thank you, Mr. Wason. In the budget book, it notes that the transportation funds,
- $2.1 million reflects dollars for sidewalks that live in the Public Works Administration budget. Can somebody explain that to me? What does that mean? Can you repeat that question? I think I'm going to need the controller's help on this one. I'm not sure. OK. It says in your memo after the breakdown, high-performing government, $841,000.
- than transportation, 2.1 million. Then it says, note, the high number for transportation reflects dollars for sidewalks that live in the Public Works Administration budget. I'm sorry, where are you pointing to in the memo? I'm not seeing what you're referring to in our actual memo. The top of page 118.
- Of the packet of the whole packet. That's OK. Second page of your memo with the one with the charts on it. Yes, so that that 841 numbers going to represent all of the different aspects that public works.
- will present on during that of the admin budget that are related to transportation. So that is going to include things like our sidewalk grinding and saw cutting contract. I believe that includes our resident participation program that we have that goes underutilized. That's going to also include our sidewalk contracted sidewalk work for ADA ramps. And when we go in and do work for sidewalk panels that are
- Impacted by street trees. So a city on street tree impacts a private sidewalk. We go in and make those repairs So it's all all those funding levels would be included into that So why is that in the administration and not like facilities or street budgets? Because we administer those contracts out of the admin office with the Board of Public Works Okay, is that
- Something I could trace like is that has that always been the case or is that new? It's always been in our budgets and admin admin Okay Yeah, we can track that for you certainly Yeah, I'd love to see if there's an increase or decrease or whatever in that Thank you Councilmember Stossberg
- About your your new proposed position. Okay, so just to clarify you said on the slides that you have two new positions But only one of them is being presented right now and the other one will be presented later on in facilities. Okay, great I just wanted to clarify that so in terms of the one talked about tonight this deputy director. Yes Which is proposed in the org chart to then have the fleet maintenance and sanitation and street all
- Reporting to them to do those three folks currently report to you. Yes. Okay, so that would be kind of like Streamlining that to you know take a little bit of less reporting off of you Yeah, I can just kind of give an overview of the vision here if you'd like it's the intent here is really Street fleet and sanitation are three largest Union shops within public works. They're also the three farthest away from City Hall and
- And the whole intention of this position is to assist as a position that would have those three union shops report up to the deputy director, and then that person report up to me. It does a few things. I spent a lot of my time on union workplace issues, whether it's different types of disciplinary things or policies and procedures.
- in coordination with HR.
- And to centralize that into this operations position will free up a lot of my time to focus on some of the bigger higher priority larger strategic things across the whole department. And so the whole intent here is really to have those three very operational service heavy divisions report up through this position to free up some of my time for more of the bigger picture stuff working on the budget stuff with Jessica more closely working on the operations center proposal and what we're hoping to do there you know spending more time
- on the strategic capital planning things that are ever changing with all the state funding changes and such so that's kind of the vision and the hope for that position okay so is I see how that will streamline internal operations how is that going to improve a resident experience how will it improve a resident experience yeah with
- those being our three well so fleet is an internal service division but with street and sanitation those are our two divisions that have probably the most touch points with residents on a daily basis obviously sanitation pickup is hitting almost fifteen fourteen thousand six hundred ish houses every every week and the street division is doing everything with our public rights away and maintenance so hopefully they'll see some improved operations there and overall just
- a more streamlined department, which should be better operationally for the whole city. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions? Nope, doesn't look like it. Okay, now we move to public comment. Yes, public comment. Doesn't look like there's anybody in chambers who might be interested, but is there anybody on Zoom raising their hand? No. No. Okay. All right, we'll bring it back then.
- Two council members for final comments. Anybody have any final comments to say for this portion of Public Works? Yes, council members Zulek. I'll just say thank you to Director Grayson. We've talked a little bit about clearing sidewalks during snowstorms, and so I really appreciate you following through on that. Yeah, it'll be expensive. Any other comment?
- No more comment on this section then. So now we move to Department of Public Works facilities maintenance division and I believe presenting is director Wason and director Borough. No just me tonight. He's online to answer any questions that I may need but they all start really early in the morning and so nine o'clock at night isn't normal work schedule for them but.
- Our facilities maintenance division. This is a small but mighty group of our team JD borough is our director of facilities maintenance Nick Spagnola is a new employee in that division this year. He's a Operations and asset management under his title and then Russell flake and Barry Russell and Barry Wallach
- are two of our maintenance custodians that just try to keep everything going. The thing with facilities maintenance is this is a division, while we did add one position last year, their responsibilities in the number of facilities that they're maintaining and managing on behalf of the city has grown in the recent past. This includes some of the buildings on Hopewell. It includes West Showers. It includes even the College Square building from years back.
- All buildings that are just taking more time and effort to manage some of the things that we've been really working on and 2025 JD and his team has been really.
- assisting the fire department with all of their projects, both their remodel projects at their fire stations, as well as the project on South Walnut Street, assisting BPD with some capital improvements on South Walnut and with what they do down there. And then really working pretty tirelessly on all of our contracts and everything that goes into maintaining the 20, I think we're up to 28 facilities under facilities maintenance at this point.
- Some of the things that we're gonna be looking to in 2026 is we've got to make some investments at the Waldron. That's where, in particular with the roof of the WFHB building with the city owning that. Our enclosure out in front of the city hall on the north side needs to be rebuilt. And then we're gonna continue with the carpet replacements that we've been doing throughout the building. Some of the other things that we're really kind of focused on as challenges and other opportunities.
- You know, we talk a lot about the operation center and for public works and the main driving factor for that is not only to get a more modernized workplace for those staff members But we have ever increasing costs in maintaining those old buildings and old facilities. It is a It's just the opportunity cost of a new building is continuing going up each day that we don't get that bill and
- You know so we're looking at all of our different systems we've got new lighting at city hall we've got we're looking at our age fact electrical and plumbing systems for efficiencies.
- You know, one thing that I do know to hold true with our facilities budget each year, there is going to be something that's going to be large and unforeseen that we're going to have to figure out how we're going to pay for it. Whether it's a water cooling tower or a generator or it's just by nature with these large buildings and these large systems that are needed to maintain them, something is going to fail. And we are going to need to pivot quickly and figure out how we're going to pay for that.
- I talked about Showers West and the other buildings. While they hold lots of opportunity, they do require staff time to manage and maintain those. Yeah, big thanks to JD and his team. They're ever busy. Just this morning, we were resetting this room from Farmers Market over the weekend and making sure that we could get everything set, but it's a daily grind for that team and we appreciate their efforts. I will be happy to answer any questions you have.
- Thank you very much. Any questions from councilmembers? Councilmember Piedmont-Smith.
- Division as well. Sorry, can you speak to why an additional downtown specialist is needed? What what do they do? Yes, so the downtown specialist this started many many many years ago when I was actually in the mayor's office and Suzy Johnson was our public works director This was a position that was just meant to focus efforts on downtown cleanliness on relationships with the business owners and
- And that position has been highly successful. If you talk with downtown business owners or other regular visitors to the downtown, many of them will know Zach, our current downtown specialist. But Zach is one person and our needs downtown are ever growing. So with Zach being one person, that means he works a five day week. That means we have two days a week where we have no coverage downtown for the things that arise. And so this additional position position would be to not only assist with the
- the same efforts that Zach's undertaking, but also offset scheduling. So that position helps with special events. So Taste of Bloomington was back downtown. Great, successful event. Zach spent about half of his day just working on things with Taste of Bloomington that day. Responding to issues that are occurring with our individuals experiencing homelessness downtown. We respond to a lot of cleanup things and efforts. And when you have two days a week when no one's here, that means we have to go find someone else to go do those things.
- and either myself or staff down at the street division or sanitation. So we're looking to fund this position to not only continue just the great efforts, but also to really offset the scheduling as well. Thank you. Any other questions? Council Member Ruff. Mr. Wyson, would you imagine, would there be,
- a conceivable situation in the future where facilities maintenance would be involved in any kind of maintenance at the new Convention Center once it's built? No, I do not. No. The CIB, I mean, I don't know the ins and outs of all of the legal requirements of the CIB and the Convention Center Management Corporation, but I would have to guess that that would be entirely separately run.
- Okay, thank you Any other questions Okay, no councilmember Stossberg Super fast in the line items fuel and fuel costs are down I believe we put one vehicle back in We put one of their vehicles into our pool so the pool of vehicles that other staff can utilize the shared vehicle pool So I think that's why we might be down a little bit in fuel
- Okay, so it's not so much that fuel costs are down or that we've transitioned. It's that there's a vehicle that's now somewhere in a different budget somewhere. Yes. Okay. Okay, last call for questions. All right, we'll open it up for public comment now. Is there anybody online who would like to make public comment? Please raise your hand or if anybody in chambers would like to come make public comment. Any hands? No.
- Alright, nobody's got any comments right now. So we'll come back to council for final comments on Facilities maintenance division any comments council members will look. Thank you. I'll just plug the downtown specialist position. The downtown business owners are very happy with them Thank you any other comment council members toss my
- I just want to show appreciation for the assistance given by, I believe it's this Department of Public Works to help council office shift over to Showers West to be in a space that all of our staff can be in because that is definitely, I think, been an improvement for our staff. So thank you for that hard work. Any other comments?
- Thank you. That wraps up that last section. And ladies and gentlemen, we're on to the final section for the evening. Department of Public Works Fleet Maintenance Division.
- Presenting Director Wason. Yes, thank you. We've got Cory Snyder, our fleet maintenance director. He's online. His mornings always start very, very early, so he was here. And I was like, go home, be on Zoom if you're ready. But Cory and his team down at fleet maintenance, I say this pretty much verbatim every year. They're really the backbone of city services. They maintain all of the vehicles and equipment that allow us to do all the things that we're responsible for across the entire city.
- It's everything from the ATV to the Zamboni and everything in between there is not a piece of equipment or a vehicle that they cannot in some way work on service or maintain This is very much a high-performance government a high-performing government Division their entire budget can be related to high-performance government We really do
- about as much as we possibly can with a staff that is as creative as they get across the city.
- Overall, in 2025 and 2026, we've focused our efforts on asset management. We've focused our efforts on our accreditation process. We've really, really been focusing, and I spoke about this in the admin budget, with all the different divisions and departments about trying to identify underutilized vehicles, vehicles that could be shared amongst departments, amongst various people in a department, amongst the various departments where we could actually share equipment and such.
- So really working on that across the board and then getting vehicles and equipment off of our roles for insurance purposes when they've met their useful life. So very busy down there with all the things with capital management. We assist all of the departments of the city from the time they have an idea of what they want to purchase until they want to take that unit out of service at end of life. So literally every step of the way with maintaining vehicles and equipment fleet maintenance assists with.
- We also have a lot to do with our environmental compliance at our fueling stations. So we've got two fueling stations at Miller Drive and Henderson, as well as on Adams Street at the Parks Ops building. So we do all fuel management for the city. So not only managing the usage of fuel by all the different departments and by each unit number for tracking and all the purposes of that, but also the environmental compliance of those sites as well.
- You know, we've got a lot that we do with our administrative team down there, whether it's Chris Axum, our parts and inventory coordinator, or Lisa Lizell out in our management office there. They really do all of the backend works that the technicians out in the garage can be as efficient as they can be throughout their work day. We're a 24-7 operation, 365 days a year. If the fire truck breaks down on Thanksgiving Day at noon, we're sending
- folks in to help them. We actually spent most of our weekend working on fire trucks so you know these are folks that are on call and they assist all day every day.
- Some of the other big initiatives, we're an internal service department, so we service all of the city vehicles across all departments in times of very heavy workloads. We are gonna prioritize our public safety, our fire trucks, our police vehicles, as well as always looking to assist CBU and sanitation to keep their vehicles up and running that are used every single day in what we do.
- So it's a pretty small team. We've got the office team and then the technicians out in the garage. We're also working on some programs with the Hoosier Hills Career Center up at North High School. They service, I think it's six school districts now throughout the region and working on an apprenticeship program with their automotive tech program, which is something that's pretty exciting. We've hosted several interns from Hoosier Hills at this point and these are talented
- young individuals that have a desire to go into that automotive tech field, which is very lucrative in this day and age, might I say. But yeah, very happy to be working with the folks up at North.
- You know, a couple things that we're gonna be looking at again this year with our use of technology down there is how do we really manage all the, what system is best to manage our assets there? We use a system called RTA right now. What platforms can they offer that might be able to keep us in better touch with the actual users of the vehicle to make sure that all of the good communication that needs to take place does in a timely fashion.
- Beyond that, you know, there's not any real big increases here category one has its increases for compensation and benefits and You know, we've got a large AFSCME contingency at fleet And then, you know, we do have some a bit of an increase in the supplies line There is nothing
- that is not more expensive when it comes to a vehicle today than it was yesterday. We're just seeing increased prices across the board. I mean, that's everything from the latex shop gloves on up to the transmissions and the big pieces of big items that run all of these vehicles. Other than that, I will put a little bit more time back on the clock and be happy to answer any questions. All right, thank you very much. Any questions? Council Member Stossberg.
- Thank you. I was just kind of noticing I was looking through the line item budgets at the end and the thing that kind of struck me is
- What I'm guessing is the line item under instruction that in 2023 was about 4,000 and in 2024 was about $50 and then it's budgeted this year for $8,000. And I'm kind of assuming that that's kind of for continued education sort of thing because I mean, there's a ton of vehicles and a ton of different types of vehicles and then there's so much technology related to this. And I guess I'm surprised that there's not
- more money that needs to be invested and kind of making sure our folks are up to date because I feel like they've got to be doing that work somehow. So how is that kind of continuing education being done and being supported by us in terms of wanting to make sure, because there's no consulting money in here anywhere. So that's the way it's like, okay, so our
- our fleet maintenance folks have to know all the things and do all the things. So how do we make sure that they know all that stuff? So they're required to keep ASE certifications, and those certifications have to be renewed on a regular basis. So they get some of their continuing education just through their ASE certification. The other thing is we spend a lot of our money on the different programs. Gosh, how am I going to say this correctly?
- Chevy for all the different brands have all their different OEM computer module products that you know when you plug in the check engine lights on and it goes so a lot of that is actually done on the software end where it's the so it's the specific vehicle types and I mean they're also computerized now that they're being given the information. I recognize yours is more about training and such but that training isn't quite as necessary given the other resources they have.
- and that answers my question, but in terms of that requirement to be ASC certified, so are they doing that out of pocket then? Or is that something that like HR, because HR talked about like having some kind of reimbursement stuff to you. Yeah, it's currently part of the collective bargaining agreement with certifications. They're required to maintain a certain number and they get compensation for up to a certain number, but part of their job description requires them to have those. Great, thank you.
- Councilmember Piedmont-Smith. Yes, Mr. Wason, I'm wondering what the status is of securing a new space for fleet maintenance, and especially the break room, which I remember touring and being quite... What I can say is that we're not as far along as I'd like to be, and a lot of that's got to do with the legislation passed at the state level.
- probably having a much different conversation today in this budget hearing about the operations center had we not be facing the impacts out of SB one and such the my personal my take on it you know the the
- The side of it that hits the general fund budgets and everything is gonna impact the city for years to come. We recognize that. But the bonding, the issue with the bonding is what really is the kicker on this one. We know we would have needed to bond for a public works facility. We were taking really smart steps last year to move capital out of being cash funded into bond funded. We were doing what we needed to do because we had smart people that knew what we needed to do. And to not have that ability is really gonna restrict us in getting that facility in a timely fashion.
- I say that in a very unfortunate way because we've been working, we've been really wanting to make some progress here. Again, I think we'd be in a much different conversation tonight had those impacts not come out of the state house. Well, hopefully we can figure out some way to improve the facilities. Thank you. Any other questions? Down here, down there.
- We will move to public comment. If there's anybody in chambers or on Zoom, please raise your hand. We'll give it a beat. Has anybody raised their hand? No. No, no more public comment. All right, so we'll come back to council. Council comments, any closing comments? Council Member Stossberg. Really fast, I just wanna shout out again, the partnership with Hootier Hills Tech Center Automotive.
- I think that that's great that we have that partnership going with them. They're a great resource, and we're also a great resource for those students that are in that program. And then just on a closing note, thank you all so much for all of your budget presentations this evening. Thank you, and good night. Any other comments? All right. Looks like that's a wrap for night one of budget hearings. Thank you, everybody, for your presentations tonight.
- We will be back here Wednesday, 530, here in chambers. I will not be your guest host that night, but I look forward to seeing everybody then. Thank you all. That ends the meeting.